It’s early December, and one of the last few days of a fall semester at Cornell. Usually, I walk into my Arabic class, exchange a quick “marhaba!”, and settle into my seat. Today, I can immediately sense something is off after entering.

The temperature in the room hasn’t been right for the past week. The heat is always cranked up too high, and the windows are kept open in a feeble attempt to counterbalance the swelter, creating a soft sort of mugginess disrupted by an occasional sharp breeze. Right now, however, the air seems to stand uncharacteristically still.

Professor Jaydaa Alkasseer, who always holds a warm smile on her face, appears visibly distressed. After her students file in, her voice breaks the heavy silence. An apology tumbles from her lips.

She describes how rebels in Syria have taken control of Hama, a strategic location close to her home village. As she worries for her family’s safety, her voice begins to tremble and tears gather in her eyes.

She turns away from her students. Her sniffles, set against the rustling of a student's jacket, are the only sounds in the room. I fiddle with my clammy fingers searching for the appropriate thing to say. How do you console someone whose home country has been splintered by conflict and violence for decades? 

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The overthrow of the al-Assad regime represents a turning point in Syria’s history. Father and son, Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad, held a harsh, authoritarian grip over the nation for over 50 years. After the al-Assad government violently quelled protests in March 2011, the situation escalated into a civil war which subsequently pulled major world powers—including the United States, Russia, and Turkey—into the conflict.

Wassan Nasreddin, a junior at Cornell studying information science and history, describes her adolescence in Syria. Wassan was born in Damascus but moved to the town of Suwayda in 2013 after worsening conditions pushed her family away from the capital.

“My hometown is a Druze-majority city. I’m Druze myself,” Wassan tells me. I jot these terms down as she explains how the ethnic and religious makeup of Syria add to the conflict’s complexity. The Druze are an ethno-religious minority group spread out primarily across the Levant. 

Syria holds a variety of ethnic and religious groups. 74% of Syrians are Sunni Muslims. Shi'a Muslims compose the largest minority group, with 13% of citizens belonging to various branches of Shi’ism, including Alawites, Ismailis, and other denominations. Christians, Druze, and other smaller communities make up the rest of the country, with various ethno-religious majority cities scattered throughout Syria. 

As Wassan tells me about her family back home, she periodically stops to give me context about the conflict, each interruption elucidating the complexities of the situation in Syria. We sit across from each other in a noisy cafe, but somehow, every distinct word she speaks rises above the clamor.

She describes how American-imposed sanctions, along with the coronavirus pandemic, made conditions incredibly difficult for civilians. “[It] was horrible for the people because it meant our currency got worse, our resources got less—like people were starving at that point.” She tells me this was the turning point that lead Druze citizens to actively participate in the uprisings.

Giving me more background on her family, Wassan describes how her uncle was unable to leave Suwayda for fear of being forcefully conscripted into the military. I sit up a little straighter and ask her what she means.

Wassan thinks for a bit before answering: “He wouldn't pass a checkpoint unless he knew someone in that checkpoint. But if he was to leave my hometown, say, to go to Damascus, and he can't guarantee that the checkpoints wouldn't catch him, he would just not risk it.”

I ask her what a checkpoint looks like, trying to visualize what living with the normalcy of regular security checks means. Her response is immediate.

“They stop you, they ID you,” she replies. On the one-hour ride from the airport in Damascus to her house, she explains, “there would be, like, six, seven checkpoints… For every single checkpoint, the driver would have to bribe them, so they leave you alone and you just, like, move on.” She adds, “All of them took bribes. Every single checkpoint.”
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Professor Alkasseer tells me about the trips she’s recently taken back home. “Salamiyya, Damascus, Hama, Homs, and Suwayda,” she lists, shifting into her recollections of them before 2011, when the revolution against al-Assad began. “Everything was safe. No problem, just poverty. It was painful for me because I saw that people were in very bad economic situation[s].”

She pauses. “And Syria,” she says, “its economy was independent. And I think it was free. You can say it was a free country.”

Professor Alkasseer is Ismaili—another religious minority in Syria—and so is most of her hometown of Salamiyya. She tells me, “it wasn't safe for us, but we prefer to stay in our home—not to immigrate out of our country. We like Syria, and we like our city.”

The professor pauses again. She sifts through her thoughts, before describing how ISIS attacked her village in 2014.

Professor Alkasseer is one of a large number of Syrians whose lives were touched by ISIS’ partial control of Syria. The terrorist group moved into the country following the start of the civil war, at one time controlling sizable portions of the country. 

ISIS “kidnapped women and killed men, women, kids” she says. “They did terrible, terrible crimes in those villages. And they kidnapped my mother's family.” For Professor Alkasseer, 2011 changed everything. 
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She begins by prefacing that she is half-Egyptian and half-Syrian. “So my mom's family is from Syria” she starts. I'm not really sure about the timeline of it, but they ended up in Jordan,” she tells me. She says there are now many Syrians in Jordan, a development which informs her diasporic conception of self.

“The Jordanian identity has kind of been embedded into my culture,” she tells me. “I grew up most of my life thinking I was Jordanian, which has been really interesting to navigate.” She continues to explain how expressing herself early on as Jordanian made her identity more “palatable” to interpret, both for herself and the Western world. 

Maryam tells me that although she has traveled to  Jordan, visiting Syria was something she couldn’t imagine would happen. She explains that after 2011, return seemed nearly impossible.

To connect with her Syrian identity, Maryam educated herself on every issue possible. She wanted to speak out about Syria, but she felt her voice should amplify other issues in places like Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo. “Our struggles are linear,” she tells me. “It wasn’t really our place just yet.” 

She continues: “But then when people started getting news that the Syrian rebels were going into Aleppo and Homs and Hama and then just taking over one by one, drawing the regime out, I was baffled.”

She remembers calling her cousins at the time of the recent uprisings. “They’re like, ‘I think—I think Assad has left! I think Assad has left!’”

“And it was so quick, too, and the emotions were so high,” she describes. “I was sobbing for, like, two days. I could not stop crying.” Before, she had told herself that she would never see the country her family calls home. “And in that moment,” she says, "I realized it's an option to go back now.”

While she’s talking, I can’t help but notice her earrings. They’re golden and swing wildly as she speaks. When I ask her about them later, she tells me they are her mother’s, from Damascus.

When I ask her about how she kept up with the information, she opens a live map tracker on her iPhone. The tracker, known as Liveuamap–short for Live Universal Awareness Map–was started by two Ukrainians who had originally intended for it to be used to track the war in Ukraine. As I peer at the map, I imagine Wassan being blasted by immediate updates about her home halfway across the globe.

“I had my live maps. I was on the phone with my family, my friends. That's all I was doing.” She pauses for just a second, letting out a breath, then continues: “And then my hometown was liberated.”

She begins once or twice to describe the feeling to me, but she tells me she cannot. Wassan says that trying to focus on her coursework while witnessing the liberation of her nation took an emotional toll—she even petitioned for an incomplete in one of her courses. Now, she recalls the excitement and anxiety, the positive and negative turmoil. “I remember calling my family at one point and just crying,” she says, “crying because I could not believe––like—we never imagined that we would see the day where—where they just flee.”

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Wassan recalls consoling her brother over text one night as the sounds of bombs could be heard in the distance. In the aftermath of al-Assad’s demise, the Israeli military carried out air strikes all over Syria, targeting military stockpiles. Wassan tells me that although she was able to comfort her brother in the moment, her family is still anxious of what is to come. Her hometown of Suwayda is home to military stockpiles. 

When I ask her about her thoughts on Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s de facto president since December, Wassan tells me she remains optimistic about the future. “I feel like he's a smart person. Like, he's pragmatic and I feel like he could have what it takes to be a good leader, but I cannot endorse anything for sure until I see tangible results.”

“I still choose to have hope for the future. It's just, well”—she pauses in contemplation, then exhales—“realistic hope, let's say.”

Professor Alkasseer, however, fears for what is to come with the new leadership. She worries that the new government will not be any better for its people. She tells me that al-Sharaa has built his authority “over Syrian blood, Syrian bodies.”

Al-Sharaa is the leader of the main rebel group which toppled al-Assad’s government. Despite the group’s early ties with Al-Qaeda, he has insisted his fighters are not terrorists, but rather are victims of the Assad regime. Professor Alkasseer criticizes how the media portrays him, concerned that his image will be misconstrued. “A new gentleman every day, new dress every day, new watch,” she says sharply.

Although the interim government has been tasked with running the country until March, al-Sharaa has stated that it may take several years until the proper elections can be held. “It's not honest. It's not honesty at all,” the professor exclaims. “Can you build a building on a non stable base?”

Maryam, the Syrian American student, says that there needs to be some time and space “to heal and rebuild,” especially “after these atrocious war crimes against humanity were being committed for a decade.” 

I ask Maryam what she hopes to see in Syria’s future, and she tells me that parallel to the development of infrastructure, she’d like to see systems of protection put in place for women. She says that al-Assad's rule created far-reaching issues in the wider framework of human rights, including imprisonment and torture of civilians. With the new government, there is opportunity to shape women’s roles in Syrian society, moving beyond concern for the immediate safety of citizens.

Wassan shares a similar sentiment as she tells me that war only amplifies difficulties for women. She shares, after the change in authority, a concern about women’s rights. Wassan tells me that her friends panicked after a government spokesperson insisted that women should only occupy roles in accordance with their “biological nature". However, she’s not personally concerned. She tells me that the nation’s strife  has pushed women to accomplish amazing feats, and how it’s all  been “very empowering.” Amidst all the difficulties that Syrian women had to face, Wassan says, “We still managed to thrive.”

Despite her anxieties about the future of Syria, Professor Alkasseer tells me that she and her husband, Professor Munther Younes of Cornell’s Arabic program, would like to settle there in the future.

In a wistful tone, she tells me, “Munther is Palestinian, but he doesn’t like the occupation.” She adds that together, they like Syria and “hope that Syria will be better.”

As we stand for pictures once my photographer walks in, she walks over to a frame on the wall. Inside are several maps of Palestine since the early 1900s, each showing the gradual loss of Palestinian territory over time. She turns to the photographer. 

“You see this? You see Palestine? Look at how small it is now.” She stares at the frame for a moment, lost in thought before turning around for the picture.

As I end my conversation with Wassan, noise of the surrounding chatter and a faint aroma of coffee hit me, pulling me back into the present. I look up, and with a smile on her face, she tells me, “I like to believe that there's nothing we can't do anymore.”