Early on the morning of December 8, Suhail AlGhazi did the unthinkable: He spoke with his family in Syria openly, and without fear.
AlGhazi fled Syria in 2013 after taking part in early protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and surviving two brutal and terrifying stints in prison. Now living in Europe, he has spent the past decade working in support of the opposition, publishing commentary and maintaining a lively and at times belligerent presence on X, formerly Twitter.
Despite the relative safety of exile, he kept his identity hidden. Many members of his extended family still lived in and around Damascus, and he feared that his activism — or even speaking with them about anything resembling politics — would make them a target.
The Assad family controlled Syria for 53 years through a constellation of 17 intelligence agencies, instilling terror at home and at times reaching out beyond the borders of Syria to silence critics abroad. In recent years, the regime’s secret police were accused of attacks on Syrian dissidents in Germany and lured a prominent exile back to Syria with false promises of reconciliation, only to throw him in prison upon his arrival. (His emaciated body was discovered this week.) Families of dissidents or rebel fighters were often made to denounce their loved ones or face imprisonment.
So for many activists, both home and abroad, anonymity was a necessity, said Suhaib Zaino, a co-founder of the online magazine Hurriya.
“The Assad regime doesn’t just go after people inside the country,” Zaino told The Intercept, speaking under his full name for the first time. “They can also hurt people outside the country by hurting their relatives inside Syria.”
AlGhazi, wishing to protect his loved ones, had never once discussed politics with his family on the inside. Even in the days and hours leading up to the regime’s collapse, as rebel forces closed in on the capital, the fear was so pervasive and habitual that he and his relatives continued to censor themselves, speaking in generalities in conversations over WhatsApp.
After tweeting anonymously from the handle @putintintin1 for years, he began in 2020 to use a shortened version of his real name, which he felt was common enough to not be connected with his family. He never revealed his likeness online.
But when Assad fled to Moscow on Sunday morning, AlGhazi and his relatives shook off a lifetime of self-censorship, speaking openly about the remarkable events taking place.
“We talked about how Assad is gone, how happy we are to talk freely and to know that his security services can no longer threaten us, how miserable he and his father made Syria for a long time,” AlGhazi told The Intercept.
Basking in his family’s newfound freedom, AlGhazi decided to step out of the shadows online. On X, the independent activist posted a photo of himself seated at a cafe, smiling and bathed in sunlight.
“After being detained and tortured by the Syrian regime, and 10 years of forced exile, Assad has fallen and Syria is finally free,” AlGhazi wrote. “New Chapter. #NewProfilePic.”
A Collective Unmasking
The joy millions of Syrians felt was soon tempered by the images that began to emerge from newly emptied prisons where the regime had tortured and executed untold thousands of people. As rescue crews and rebels worked their way through the notorious Sednaya torture and execution facility, located on the outskirts of Damascus, they uncovered underground cells, piles of corpses, and other grisly evidence that broadly confirmed many of the details of a 2017 Amnesty International report describing the prison as a “human slaughterhouse.”
There exists grave uncertainty about the stability of the country, and both Israel and Turkey have exploited the chaos by moving aggressively to secure their own interests in Syria, while the U.S. has carried out airstrikes on what it says are ISIS militants still operating in isolated desert areas.
But after 13 years of war and half a century of dynastic autocracy that forced Syrians to censor themselves even with their family, the fall of the regime unleashed a jubilant, collective unmasking in cities across Syria on Sunday. Crowds poured into the street to celebrate, tear down statues of the old regime, and unveil their true feelings, often for the first time in their lives.
With Assad gone, many of the activists who had labored under pseudonyms for years began to come out to the world — and to their families back home.
“My country is free, there is no need to hide anymore,” wrote Oussama, a 31-year-old doctor living in Paris, who had tweeted under the name OSilent4 since 2012.
Born to Syrian exiles in France, Oussama still prefers to use only his first name, and told The Intercept in an interview that, like most Syrians, he is not naive about the challenges to come.
“Of course I am anxious, because I don’t trust any of the different political forces right now,” Oussama. “But the fate of Syria is now in Syrian hands, and that’s why I’m hopeful.”
On Tuesday evening, speaking to relatives in the city of Homs for the first time since the fall of Assad, all he could feel was joy as his aunt described the scenes of jubilation she had witnessed over the past few days. She said she could still hear people in the street shouting long-forbidden slogans against the regime.
“She was very emotional,” he said. “I haven’t seen them smiling like that in years.”
“We in the West, we only saw it on TV and in books,” he said of the war, “but they lived every day the bombs and the protests, everything, but they couldn’t speak openly.”
“Now,” he continued, “everything has changed.”
“I Had No Idea”
Syria has for years been divided into a number of areas of control and foreign influence: Northern Syria is largely controlled by a patchwork of Turkish-backed rebel factions calling itself the Syrian National Army, or SNA, while the northeast is controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led coalition with U.S. backing. As of this week, the majority of Syria is now nominally controlled by the transitional government in Damascus, an uneasy rebel coalition led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist faction that until 2016 fought under the banner of Al Qaeda and has been accused of widespread human rights abuses in the parts of northwest Syria it controlled.
Despite an amnesty for army conscripts and recent nods toward pluralism from the group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, people across the country — and particularly within minority communities — are fearful of the potential for reprisals and sectarian rule by Islamists.
“If HTS truly believes in handing out amnesties, then they should be forgiving the people that are in their prisons right now,” said Karim Aljian, a London-based psychiatrist and opposition activist born in Aleppo. “If they can forgive the conscripts of a regime that’s committed atrocities beyond description, they can show a little bit of mercy to the people that they’ve arrested.”
Courtesy of Karim Aljian
Despite his wariness of the group, the 27-year-old Aljian, who is affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based nonprofit that works closely with elements of the U.S. government, was overjoyed at the fall of the regime. The reactions of his family inside Syria, with whom he’d never dreamed of discussing politics, brought a separate wave of euphoria.
On Sunday, his cousins began posting videos of themselves waving flags and shouting slogans in celebration. Another cousin shared a photo of himself holding a picture of a relative who had been a rebel fighter and had been killed early in the war. Aljian was overwhelmed by the sudden revelation of fervent ideals from his cousins about whose opinions he had known so little.
“It just blows my mind how, the whole time, these people who mask it so well always hated the regime,” he said. “I had no idea that so many people who maintain this sense of neutrality or apologia to the Assad regime despised them.”
