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Lina Sinjab was forced to leave her home in Syria in 2013, a couple of years into the uprising against the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. She had already been arrested for her coverage of the early days of the protests and denounced by a branch of state security as a traitor—now she understood it was no longer safe for her to stay in the country. Soon after she left, government agents raided her apartment in central Damascus, destroying it. She relocated to Beirut, where for the next decade she continued to report on the civil war, as well as events across the Middle East, for the BBC.
Last week, after rebels converged on the capital, forcing Assad to flee, Sinjab was one of the first people in line to get back to her home country. She spoke to CJR from Damascus, where she has been reporting for more than a week. “This is the first time ever in my life as a journalist that I’m fearless,” she said. Her account of the past week has been edited for concision and clarity.
I was in Beirut and reporting on the ongoing war in Lebanon, and the ceasefire with Israel, when we first started hearing overnight that something was happening in Aleppo. My first thought was, No, that can’t be true. Or, if it was, that they’re just going to bomb them, they’re going to kill a lot of people.
But then I noticed that the killing and air strikes didn’t seem to be happening as you would expect. And then, quickly, Aleppo fell, and then Hama. All of a sudden, it’s Homs. I thought, There’s no way Bashar al-Assad is going to give up Homs. That’s the heartland of the Alawite community—and not just any Alawites, the Alawites who fought with him, who killed and tortured people for him, the shabiha [government thugs] who went after protesters.
As Syrians, we grew up worrying about ever being optimistic. We have a saying in Arabic that means, basically, “God, give us the good out of this laughter.” It’s about how we worry that anytime we are laughing and experiencing joy, there must be something bad that will follow. So we’re always cautious. But then, just a few hours later, Homs fell.
Immediately, I started talking to my contacts inside the government, because I wanted to know, is there any way I could go to Damascus? I was thinking I would maybe go for a short visit. But I also knew I was wanted by the Palestine Branch [a division of state security], so I always have to be careful. For the forty-eight hours or so before Assad fell, everyone I knew inside the regime went silent. No one was responding. And then a few people got back to me and said, “Hold on a bit. You may not need to worry about this in the coming days.”
Around midnight on Saturday, as the rebels were closing in on Damascus, my team and I had a call to discuss going to the border. One of my colleagues said, “Are you ready to go?” I said, “If the regime falls, I’m ready. But if not, I will have to reassess.” We went to the border, and by 5am I knew we were going to be able to go in. I crossed at exactly 8 o’clock in the morning, the moment when the Lebanese government opened the border on their side.
The first thing you see on the Syrian side is the passport control office. I had spoken to one of my contacts in Damascus, and somebody had already gone to the passport office and said there was nobody there. It’s funny because in the past, whenever I would go into Syria, I had so much fear and anxiety. I used to take anxiety pills before crossing the border, just to control my panic. There are so many checkpoints, and although I would always check if my name was on a list, and pay bribes to get it removed, still, there are so many branches of state security, I would be scared.
This was the first time that I had a light feeling inside me. We passed the border control and it was abandoned. Everything was like a ghost town. We would see rebels here and there, cheering and waving, but then you would drive through checkpoint after checkpoint, one military base after another, and they were all empty. You would still see those pictures of Bashar al-Assad, the signs saying “Syria Welcomes You”—but they’re ripped and torn.
When we got to Damascus, we went to Umayyad Square, and there were hundreds of people there. It was a mixture, the residents and the rebels. We were a bit nervous because the rebels were firing into the air, firing outrageously, so we went to our hotel and put on some protective gear. But soon we went back and started talking to people—it was like an explosion of freedom. In 2011, when Egyptians were in Tahrir Square [celebrating the end of the regime of Hosni Mubarak], we were watching the news in Damascus, and thinking, Umayyad Square is going to be the Tahrir Square of Damascus. But of course, it didn’t happen. Most protests took place in side streets and alleys. In cities where they were able to get to the central squares, like Hama or Homs, they paid a high price. The government never allowed people to reach the central squares in Damascus. It was like a dream to gather there, and now it was like a party there. It’s still happening, every night.
Reporting here over the past week has been a mixture of joy and euphoria, but also there is huge grief among the Syrians, particularly with the opening of the prisons. There’s a huge loss—it’s not something that happened over the past few years, it’s over fifty years. When the government first cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, there were reports of people being melted with acid inside those prisons—this is not something that’s new. It’s an ongoing grief, an ongoing pain. So now, there is so much loss for families who were hoping to find their loved ones, but at the same time, there is a feeling of relief—that this is not going to happen again, that the people will not allow it.
This is the first time ever in my life as a journalist that I’m fearless—even when I was reporting on the story from outside the country, the whole time I had a voice in my head monitoring what I said. I would still be very critical of the regime, but when it came to President Assad, be careful to put everything in the right words. I would worry about my family, I would worry about my apartment—there were so many thoughts in my head, like a shadow that was always behind me. Now, for the first time, I am fearless. I’m not looking for a minder behind me, I don’t need to call the Ministry of Information to ask for permission. And everyone we talk to is like, Talk, film, record! Nobody is worried. It’s a whole strange set of feelings that I’m still processing.
It still feels like a dream. You’re not sure if it’s real or not. Of course, there are still challenges to come, but for most people, we don’t want to spoil the moment of joy. We’ve been deprived of it for fifty-four years, and for the last thirteen years we spent it in grief and despair, feeling like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. So many Syrians have gone through collective trauma. This is their very first moment of happiness.
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