The Road to (and from) Damascus
Notes from a week in Syria
Syria is perhaps the poorest place I have ever been, by the numbers at least. It maintains its dignity in a way that obscures its poverty: 90% of the population is below the poverty line ($3.65/day), 66% in absolute poverty ($2.15/day), GDP is down 80% since 2011, half the population displaced during the war. Syria might sound unliveable by the statistics, but people have endured far worse so it feels liveable to them. A man told me life was good now because he used to go to the grocery store and worry that his family would be dead by the time he returned. A woman is excited to have students again, even though she often tutors for free since the person will go hungry if they pay her. A family says their children are finally getting better education (they send them to private school for $100/year) although they cannot afford to eat meat and borrow to make rent each month. Their measurement of a good life is incomprehensible to outsiders, but it is hard not to be moved by how strong of a front they put up.
Most comparably poor countries have always been poor, whereas Syria regressed from being an industrialised country. Syrians do not seem to assign blame, there are too many candidates: fifty-four years of the Assads, the Arab Spring, interference from Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, and the West in the war, ISIS and a constellation of other jihadi groups, then a 2023 earthquake in the north. In December 2024, the regime fell and Assad fled to Moscow, and the West decided Syria was finally a friend. Since then, the US has began to lift sanctions, removed the terrorist designation from its new government (a former al-Qaeda affiliate) and Syria begins the long path of rebuilding.
We arrive at the Jordanian-Syrian border, staring at the options: Women Arrivals, Arab Arrivals, Foreign Arrivals, Syrian Arrivals, Jordanian Arrivals. We tentatively choose the women’s line and find ourselves behind a row of men, one of whom escorts us to Jordanian Arrivals, behind a Congolese man. We have pre-applied for visas on US passports, but having entered Jordan on Hong Kong passports, they demand to see our exit stamps. Holding both, the guard looks up. “You are Chinese?” I nod. He hands back the US passports as I try to explain our Syrian visas are registered to those. “But you are Chinese?”
He takes the Hong Kong passports away and returns with a slip: $25. The cashier stares at the passports, “You are not Chinese, you are Hong Kong!” We say Hong Kong is Chinese, and they argue with us in broken English, saying Hong Kong visas are $150, still less than the $250 I’ve been told for US passports, so I nod. Animatedly, he points at me, “150 US dollars! US dollars! Are you sure? Are you sure this is ok? 150 each!” They take the passports away and spend a long time arguing in the back room, one of them intermittently sucking on the cover of my passport. When they return, I present three $100 bills. One laughs, “Mistake, mistake, too much. $25 ok!” We give them $50 and they laugh as we walk away.
Our driver assured us this kind of chaos was only temporary, the new government is improving things like this.
Many Syrians are less optimistic about the new government. A Christian woman I met lamented that they had at least held elections in the Assad era, nobody had voted for this president. She says that sectarianism had never existed until this new regime adopted the western talking points. She worried that Christians were becoming repressed, Easter celebrations now had to be held in private and her Muslim friends no longer joined in, as they always had. She resented the new regime’s attention to what she considered frivolous matters: restricting alcohol, cracking down on pornography, introducing speed cameras, getting rid of anti-Israel signs. “Now we understand nothing,” she said. “We are less hopeful for change than before.” Eighteen months into the transition she felt there was no progress to be seen. “People are getting poorer and poorer than before.” Public sector wages suggest otherwise, having risen 10-35x. She felt that Syria was being passed around, “The bus was being driven by Iran and Russia, now it’s being driven by Turkey and America.”
A man across town offered a different account. His current wife is Sunni Muslim, his ex-wife Christian, his neighbours Alawite and Shia. He insisted that Syrians continue to be the most inclusive, and even his Jewish friends have returned under the new regime. He mentioned his cousin, a polygamous Muslim married to both a Christian and a Muslim woman which is acceptable because from each woman’s perspective, she is in a monogamous marriage. He insisted only Alawites, Assad’s minority sect, had ever been sectarian.
In the old city, we passed several shops selling pictures of Saddam Hussein. Our local companion pointed it out, explaining that Syria needed a strong leader like him. She had visited Iraq before 2003 and found people happy and free under him, just as her country had been under Assad. “We wish he’d come back,” she said. “Or someone like him. Everyone knows our lives were better before, how can they wake up one day and pretend to hate someone everyone knew we liked?” (perfect example of Timur Kuran’s Private Truth, Public Lies).
We walk into a cafe, where a soldier rests his chin on the barrel of his gun as he smiles at me. Another soldier has his shoes off, foot up on a chair, with a missing toe. Some Chinese men from Lanzhou (= Muslim) started talking to me, they had moved to Damascus two months ago and liked life here, making ~$100/month at a Chinese hostel. They summarised Syria: the food is bad but the police are fair. He was most appalled by our indulgence of the local cuisine. “A week of Syrian food! Let me show you where the Chinese supermarket is so you don’t have to suffer anymore.” The hostel’s owner was another Chinese Muslim with Egyptian-accented Arabic, who spoke of his plans to expand into a chain.
I ran into a group staying at said hostel in Palmyra, who explained that Chinese hostels are always a goldmine in places like this: they don’t advertise on English websites, so you can only find them on ChatGPT, and they’re always cheaper and cleaner. He tells me that Syria has the most trusting and generous people of anywhere he has been, and I am inclined to agree. For example, I tried to buy some things at an antiques store but didn’t have enough cash on me and the owner wrapped the things up for me and told me to just leave the money at my hotel, he’d grab it later.
At a cafe near the Roman ruins of Bosra, I ask to use the bathroom. The cafe owner smiles and apologises that he doesn’t have one, gesturing to the cafe’s exterior which has been bombed out. There is one small area they’ve cleared, which is the cafe, left and right are piles of rubble. A boy of maybe 10 waves me over and the owner tells me to follow him. He takes my hand and walks rapidly over to another cleared structure among more rubble, which seems to be his home, and gives me a short look around before letting me use the bathroom. This area is between Deraa, where the war started, and Suwayda, where it continues to go on today (Jordan is bombing to destory its captagon production).
On the road to the Crusader-era castle, Krak des Chevaliers, we pass many checkpoints. At each, the guards joke with our friendly driver, one even dances for him, with his gun bouncing on his hip as he does so. I ask the driver how he knows all the guards, he says he doesn’t, the guards are all like this when they don’t have particular orders. At the castle, we discuss who has fought here, and among discussions of the Ottomans and Crusaders, a guard strolling around says hi to my guide. He abruptly switches to discussing the most recent fights here: ISIS had taken over the castle and imprisoned that man here. The overlay of recent events was often given more attention than the remnants of the distant past in such monuments.
At the Aleppo citadel, he shows me secret passages with bullets on the ground and says his tourists like to take them home as souvenirs. Aleppo was the hardest hit city, worsened by the earthquake, and it is difficult not to be shocked by every street corner’s destruction. A minaret that stood for 1000 years fell for the first time 12 years ago. Next to every rebuilt wall stands a falling wall, often in the same house; the skyscrapers have their windows blown out; shops occupy the ground floor level of buildings that have collapsed in on themselves; street signs have bullet holes. He points out various destruction, being careful to differentiate war and earthquake destruction, and telling me the exact date that every wall was rebuilt, most of it in the last year. We walk around to see that restaurants that haven’t been open since before the war are finally reopening, most of which have opened in the last three months, after 14 years.
At Palmyra, the destruction by ISIS is pointed out more to us than the underlying site. “It’s safe! Just don’t step anywhere I don’t because there might still be mines”. At every site, the guide tells us how much dynamite was used to blow up each site and what atrocities ISIS committed there. The Temple of Bel had been blown apart by 30 tonnes of dynamite, the theatre was bulldozed then the head archaeologist was beheaded on livestream with 20 others executed. A Bedouin man selling tourist trinkets follows us, and when we have refused for long enough, he ups his game trying to sell us ISIS money. In one tomb, we go into a hidden alcove that once held dozens of bodies which was only discovered when ISIS used the main chamber as a prison and the prisoners found the hidden tomb in search of an exit. Our guide tells us that growing up, Palmyra was known as a place people went to party, but it has been a long time since people have partied here.
On the road back to Damascus, we stopped at the Bagdad Cafe, named for the American film, run by a Bedouin family who moved to Lebanon during the war to keep their son from being conscripted, and returned the day after Assad fell. In 2010, the owner had told The Guardian: “We’ve had our president, the Chinese prime minister and a bunch of German politicians call in for lunch.” Now they raise goats and serve a couple tourists a day, on a good day (Palmyra itself gets 5-10 tourists a day). Down the road, the highway from Iraq was backed up with oil tankers, the Al-Tanf crossing had been hastily reopened while the actual infrastructure would take months, to give Iraq an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. The intersection with this Iraq highway is the only checkpoint where guards seem to be alert, not dancing.
At the Four Seasons Damascus, which has not been a real Four Seasons since 2019 when its majority owner was sanctioned and management pulled out, Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris roam the halls. Maseratis and Range Rovers are parked in the driveway, contrasting the average car in Syria, which is usually secondhand, commonly with only one door opening with mirrors taped in place and cloth for windows. In our five nights there, we see no tourists. The concierge laughs when we ask for tourism recommendations. We saw three female guests. Much of the staff are very made up Syrian women, with lip filler to rival Slavic women. In the complex, there are fake restaurants from well-known brands like Em Sherif (Lebanese chain popular in Monaco and London), Cafe de Flore (Parisian cult cafe), and Angelina (Parisian patisserie).
The delegations shuffling through the “Four Seasons” are promising billions of dollars. UAE’s Emaar promises $19B, more than the total GDP today which is ~$13B. The estimated cost to rebuild Syria is $200B, but the Syrian Investment Authority seems more keen on soliciting investment for its 590 projects, costing from hundreds to millions, for yacht clubs to traffic light factories. They claim that they have “one of the world’s top 10 investment laws” with 100% tax exemptions for foreign investors. The division between this and the average Syrian’s life is hard to reconcile.
Everyone I met had chances to go abroad, many of their families had moved to Europe. But they chose to stay because they didn’t feel like refugees. Whatever Syria had been reduced to, they had declined to be reduced along with it. Women put on a full face of makeup even when they have subsided off only bulgur for weeks, people gift you Syrian delicacies upon meeting you, coffee arrives as you walk into someone’s home or store. It is easy to find corners of Damascus where the prolific indoor smoking and shisha cloud reality but it is hard to forget for too long, once you step outside again.
This is important: no Jews have returned to Syria. The last Jews left Syria in the 90s, from Damascus, and migrated en masse to Brooklyn NY. The Syrian-Jewish community is incredibly wealthy, insular and tight-knit, and suffice it to say it would be well-known if even one person had migrated back (if for no other reason than that their standard of living would go from upper middle class American to the poverty you describe, all for a country that they haven’t been to in at least 30 years) - they did not. The guy you spoke to about this is making things up.
Also, I am both baffled and offended by the notion that Syrian food is inferior to Chinese food.
>”People are getting poorer and poorer than before.”
>Public sector wages suggest otherwise, having risen 10-35x
Fun account, but had a good chuckle at this part especially given the poverty you witnessed. Of course a government like the one you’d find in ruined country after one side won a civil war would use its meagre resources to pay its supporters, especially “civil servants” likely still in possession of the rifles they used to win