Years of reporting on Syria, the road to Damascus and the fall of al-Assad

I’ve covered Syria for years, from the start – when anti-regime protests began in March 2011.

We were in Deraa, southern Syria. It was a Friday and people called it the “Day of Dignity”. They took to the streets to protest the deaths of dozens of people killed by security forces in previous days.

Demonstrations began because of the detention and torture of children for spray-painting anti-Assad graffiti on the wall of their school.

It was almost unthinkable in Syria – a tightly controlled country where people were afraid to utter any word against the regime.

Yet “enough is enough” was what I heard time and time again. Other words that people kept chanting were “justice and freedom”. The Arab Spring had reached Syria.

Thirteen years later I found myself back at the Omari Mosque in Deraa, the epicentre of the protest movement – where the euphoria was palpable. The regime had collapsed; the al-Assad dynasty had ended.

I didn’t believe I was back.

The road to Damascus

December 8, 4am: We made our way from Beirut to the Masnaa border with Syria because reports were coming in that Damascus had fallen. When we reached the crossing less than two hours later, we saw Syrians celebrating the news. Some were even preparing to make their way back home.

I had no idea we would be able to enter Syria that morning. I didn’t know whether the Lebanese border authorities would allow us in or what would be waiting for us on the other side. Were regime forces still stationed at the border? Would the opposition fighters welcome us?

I contacted a friend in Deraa who was an opposition activist. I asked him if he could meet us on the Syrian side of the border and take us to Damascus. “I need an hour,” he told me.

We crossed the border when it opened at 8am. It’s a 40-minute drive to the centre of what was Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power. The last time I drove this road was in 2011.

As we made our way to the central Umayyad Square, we saw people tearing down the symbols of the regime. Abandoned tanks were left on the highway, army uniforms strewn along the roadsides.

The streets weren’t crowded, yet; people were still at home, afraid, still unsure what they were dealing with.

We drove to Umayad Square. I needed to pinch myself to believe that I was actually there.

Celebratory gunfire was nearly nonstop. The opposition fighters were from across Syria. They too looked shocked. But the feeling you got was that they were breathing again.

That first live from Umayyad Square

It was time to do our job … to broadcast those images to the world. I think we were among the first international journalists in the square that morning.

But we had major communication issues. I managed to send a few video clips from my phone to the news desk in Doha but we couldn’t broadcast live.

Syrian state TV was located at Umayyad Square. I asked the opposition fighters who were guarding the building if they had any means to help us. “You have to help us,” I told them.

They didn’t know how to operate the satellite truck so they began to search for the employees. An hour or so later an engineer showed up to work and helped us report live about history in the making.

It was almost surreal that we used the resources of a channel that for decades was used by a regime to control the narrative – to tell the world that there is a new Syria.

The atrocities, and false hope

The regime fell and the secret doors opened. Prisoners were set free by opposition fighters but there were many others still missing.

For years I reported about the enforced disappearances in Syria, the unlawful and arbitrary arrests by security forces, and the suffering of the victims’ families. We had spoken to them, to human rights lawyers, and to activists for so many years.

And then I found myself in Sednaya Prison. The story was in front of us. It was real.

There were thousands of people making their way to the detention facility, which was on top of a steep hill. They walked for almost three kilometres (two miles). Everyone had the same story – they came in the hope of finding a loved one. They came from across Syria.

It was Day Two since Damascus was “liberated”. Those who were inside the prison, believed to be a few hundred, were set free.

Where are the others?

More than 100,000, according to Syrian human rights groups, are unaccounted for.

We watched their families – fathers, brothers, mothers, wives, and sisters – hang on to false hope.

There were rumours of secret chambers and hidden cells underground, even though a White Helmet civil defence volunteer told us that was not true. “We checked the whole area.”

“Then why are you still digging?” I asked him.

“Can’t you see them? How desperate they are … We have to do something even if it is false hope … just for them.”

Families were reading every paper they could find hoping to find any clue.

There was none in this pitch-black prison except for the unimaginable horrors in what people there told us was the “execution room”.

As we made our way back to the car, more people were arriving.

“Did they find anybody? Did they find anybody?” they would ask us.

If the dead could speak

More doors had opened since Bashar al-Assad’s rule came to an end. Mass graves were being unearthed.

We were told there were many in the town of Qutayfa, north of Damascus. After years of silence and fear, locals began to speak out.

Among them was the town’s graveyard caretaker who told us he prayed over dozens of bodies that security forces buried there in 2012. Another man told us that the regime’s men used his bulldozers and machinery to dig graves.

“Yes, I watched them dump the bodies that were in refrigerated trucks inside the graves but we couldn’t talk or else we would be killed as well,” he told us.

He showed us where. We were standing on a mass grave.

Stand and bear witness

It wasn’t the first time I reported on regime atrocities in Syria. In 2013 in Aleppo, we watched Syrians in the opposition-controlled east of the city remove dozens of bodies from the river that flowed from government-held areas on higher ground.

They had gunshot wounds to their heads and their hands tied. We then watched relatives try to identify them in a school courtyard.

I had difficulty sleeping that night. I also had difficulty sleeping after visiting Sednaya Prison.

I tried to put myself in their shoes and thought: “How is it possible to live all these years not knowing where your loved one is, to think of the torture they went through and to see the execution room, to stand in the same room … and then imagine what they had to go through?”

We can’t change what happened. We can only document history and hope the victims and their families will one day find peace, justice and accountability.

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