Dear Jiddo

Editorial Note: Syria fell to US- and Israeli-backed mercenary forces almost one year ago. These forces were composed of a coalition of al-Qaeda and ISIS offshoots, and were just as brutal and evil as their international recruits spanning from Chechnya to Western China. We publish this fictional letter "Dear Jiddo" (Dear Grandpa) sent to us by Sarmad Tokatlian in commemoration of the fall of Syria. It is an extraordinary loss—one suffered by all the peoples of the Arab nation, the West Asian region, the Axis of Resistance, and above all, the peoples of Syria. The nation now faces fragmentation and unprecedented violence, funded and armed by the US, Israel, Turkey, and the Gulf States. We stand in solidarity with the courageous people of Syria who dare to fight against this evil onslaught. As Sarmad wrote to his Jiddo, "just like the Palestinians resist and the Lebanese resist, we will also resist. So now the struggle begins."

Dear Jiddo,

I am writing this to you from Sham, your beloved city. The beating heart of the Arab World. Our Arab World. Where you were born, where I was born. Where you are buried and Inshallah where I will be buried, too. I know how much you and Tete loved Sham. The other day I was laughing with mama about how Tete used to always say Sham was the best place in the world. Mama would poke fun at her: How would you know? You’ve never been anywhere else. Who needs to go anywhere else when you live in Sham?, she’d respond proudly.

I guess Tete had a point. Damascus is the oldest constantly inhabited city in the world. Just like you, she loves our family home. After all, it is in the oldest part of the city, Bab Touma, protected by thousand-year-old walls. Why would you go anywhere else?

I went to Hammam al Souq last night and thought of you. Khalto Mary was telling me how you used to go there every Sunday before you built the hammam at home. When I went with Sami and Pierre, there was a groom there with all his friends preparing for his wedding. One of his friends brought a darbakeh into the hammam. The groom put the taseh on his head and sTtarted shaking his hips every time his friend drummed a new beat on the darbakeh. His other friends were throwing water and soap all over him. The dancing and the water fights were infectious and soon we all joined in, a bunch of young Syrian men dancing and hurling soapy water at each other in a bathhouse from the tenth century. I wondered to myself if you did this with your friends back in the day, too? We washed ourselves over and over until the bar of soap they gave each of us melted away.

When we finally got out of the bathing section and entered the courtyard of the hammam, some other people sitting to one side of the classic Damascene mosaic fountain were eating shawarma from a take-out stall. Instead, the hammam staff served us the majadarrah and salatat jareer that Pierre had made and brought with us, insisting it was a staple meal post-hammam. I felt the cleanest I had ever been, and remembered why you would bring yourself here every Sunday.

Today is one of those sad days where I am glad you are not here to witness what is happening in our homeland. Last night, while we were at the hammam, horrific sectarian massacres took place on the coast. In Jableh and Banyas, a takfiri group that calls themselves Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) massacred two-thousand Alawites. Probably more. We have been so worried about this, Jiddo. You see our region has become a nightmare—the imperialists are relentless and they know no bounds. You missed this, but over the last fourteen years there has been a dirty proxy war on Syria, where the US, NATO, Israel, Turkey and the Gulf countries conspired against us. Through their proxies, they sowed chaos in the country. They funded and armed mercenaries driven by a horrible sectarian ideology to unleash terror in Syria. These mercenaries have gone by many names—Daesh, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, but their latest iteration is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Organisation for the Liberation of Syria. In typical Shami humour, people have been calling them Hayat Tahrik al-shai, Organisation for the Stirring of Tea. It is a way to make light of the dark reality; HTS is known for chopping people's heads off in dramatic public executions to consolidate their rule.

That reminds me of my friend Radwan who lived in Raqqa when Daesh took over the village in 2013. I remember one night we were at my friend Samar’s house drinking tea and smoking argeeleh in Bar Sharqi, right near your old carpentry workshop (which by the way they have turned into a fancy new jewelry shop). Mama says you might not even recognise Bab Sharqi if you saw it today because all those beautiful old multi-generational Shami homes have been converted into luxury hotels and restaurants. It’s also where all the bars are, and after dancing late into the night, I love being able to walk back home through the old town, where your workshop was.

Anyway, at the time, Israel had just unleashed their genocidal assault on Gaza in October of 2023. Samar, Wissam, Sami and I couldn’t stop reading the news and fretting, but Radwan seemed calm. When I asked him how he was so unperturbed, he said it was because he had seen it all. He told me that when Daesh stormed his city, he and his family were terrified, despite being Sunni Muslims themselves. The first thing they did was burn a centuries old Bible in their house. No one in the family was Christian but his Dad had cherished this Bible as a historical artifact. They were so worried Daesh would find it, consider them infidels, and murder them in their homes. It was safer to burn the Bible. Radwan describes walking out of his house the next day only to find dozens of human heads severed from their bodies and impaled on stakes in the town square. His next-door neighbour was connected to one of the Daesh fighters somehow, and managed to secure them a medical pass on the grounds that his mother needed to have cataract surgery in Damascus. When the Daesh fighter handed him the medical pass, he remembered noticing how the fighter’s pupils were dilated like the sun, his jaws clenched. He was undoubtedly on stimulants. They had 24 hours to evacuate their home. They each packed a backpack and headed for Damascus, leaving the family home they had all grown up in, not knowing whether they would ever return.

When the imperialists orchestrated a coup that installed the Daesh fighter’s group into power in Damascus, many people claimed this was a ‘Syrian Revolution.’ I tried reminding them of public beheadings of Syrian civilians simply for being Alawite or Christian, and the destruction of churches in Maaloula and Aleppo. I tried explaining to them that if your gun and your salary are paid for by the imperialists, then you are an agent of empire. I asked them why this so-called revolutionary force never shot a single bullet at Israel, an entity that was inflicting a genocide on their fellow Sunnis in Palestine. These people argued that they were reformed now, that the beheadings were a thing of the past, as if being in Daesh was like a summer internship. I tried to remind them of what the US, NATO, Israel, and the Gulf countries did to Iraq and Libya. They completely shattered those countries for daring to refuse full capitulation to imperialist interests. Yet, people seemed to think Syria would be different. Why don’t people learn from history, Jiddo?

As the new takfiris rolled into Sham under the air cover of Zionist warplanes, the Zionists opportunistically moved in from the already occupied Golan heights and are now in Quinetera, swallowing up the whole South. Turkey moved in from the North and occupied Aleppo, while the US sat back comfortably as they have been long-occupying the northeast, stealing all of our oil and selling it to Israel. I told Khalo Apo this the other day and he sighed, “even Allah won’t be able to get rid of them now.” Khalo is old now, but he seems to have a better understanding of what is happening than many of the people in the region, who somehow want to believe Syria is “free.”

As some people cheered it on, it was as though they were reacting to two distinct events taking place on two different channels, rather than one singular historical process. On Channel One, they cheered for the downfall of the Syrian Arab Republic by a Western-backed coup. On Channel Two, they bemoaned Israel’s encroachment of Syrian territory in the days after the coup. They failed to draw the connections between what was happening. It was plain to see Israel covertly coordinated HTS. Even if the lowest level fighters on the ground didn’t know it, Jolani most certainly did. I know you are turning in your grave now, Jiddo.

Immediately after the sectarian killings began. They went after Alawites, Druze, Shias and Christians. They started hanging Alawites in public, tying innocent people to a rope and dragging them through the streets. I had only seen that level of brutality from the Israelis towards the Palestinians, and the Americans towards the Iraqis. I guess you experienced it first-hand in 1948 in Palestine, when they kicked you and all the other Arabs out. I’m sad I never got to talk to you about that. I was so proud when I visited the Roman Catholic Church you helped build in Haifa. Tant Teresa lives in Quds now and she told me how you made those beautiful wooden windows. The windows still remain, Jiddo, and to me they are vestige and a reminder that we are the Indigenous Arab inhabitants of the land, its true inheritors, not Israel, America, nor their thinly disguised proxies. I can’t believe it used to be just a two-hour drive for you between Sham and Haifa. This commute is now beyond the realm of comprehension because of the artificial borders they imposed on us.

Jiddo, anyone who has been paying attention to Syria in the last fourteen years, knew the sectarian massacres were coming. The Syrian Arab Army had been the last line of defence against the imperialist-backed mercenaries. We tried to tell people, but they called us “Assadists”, as if we worshipped the guy and were not speaking from a place of defending our sovereignty. Those Western “leftists” had nothing to say about the US sanctions on Syria that dilapidated our country. You should know that Syria stood firmly alongside Palestine this entire time. We were a key member of the Axis of Resistance, which people seem to forget, and though Syria was battered by war and sanctions, we accepted the dreadful living standards because we knew we were supporting Palestine. We accepted only one hour of electricity a day, scampering to charge our phones and turn on the hot water switch the second we heard the loud thud of the building indicating the power was back so as to not miss our one opportunity in the day for a hot shower. We put up with the undignified clamouring at a moment's notice to find the red jerry cans to run down to the street to collect our government-subsidised petrol for the month, which if we missed, we knew we would spend our entire monthly salary on transport to and from work. We endured the obscene inflation that meant we had to carry around ludicrous wads of cash in bum bags just to buy some groceries and a knaffeh from the shop. We accepted that our beloved elders' vision would deteriorate and blood sugar levels would fluctuate causing them to faint unexpectedly until their regular medication could be imported back into the country. We withstood day-to-day denigration because we knew opposing US hegemony comes at a cost. It’s like Nasrallah always said, “there is a high price for resisting, but an even higher price for capitulation.” Many Syrians, like Palestinians, Iranians, Yemenis, and Lebanese, understood this, and bore the cost of resistance.

It is devastating to see Syria be carved up into sectarian pieces as the imperialists have yearned for so long, Jiddo. And I’m so glad you’re not here for it. When you left us, Syria, just like Tete used to say, was the best place in the world. But now you and Tete are both gone. And our homeland is being swallowed up like the Zionists tried to swallow up Palestine when you lived there. But just like the Palestinians resist and the Lebanese resist, we will also resist. So now the struggle begins.

Miss you,

Sarmad