San Diego is a microcosm of the Middle East, as well as a home to a large Syrian community, both Muslim and Christians. Syrians in our area might be rejoicing or apprehensive about the recent fall of the Assad government in Damascus.
I decided to travel to the Middle East in the summer of 2000, to discover if I had any surviving relatives from the Lebanese Christian side of my family, who I believed lived near the town Baalbek, the site of ancient Roman ruins. I first visited Syria then, after President Hafez al-Assad died, and handed over power to his son, Bashar. Their portraits were ubiquitous.
On the way, I met a Syrian-American, who I was envious of, as she could travel to her country, a stable dictatorship, under Bashar, a young ophthalmologist who Syrians thought would liberalize the country. I came from Iraq and I never imagined Saddam Hussein would be overthrown in my lifetime.
During my trip to Syria I was concerned about how trees and vegetation were abundant on the Turkish side of the border, but not in Syria. I worried about the flow of the Euphrates downstream, as it fed my ancestral home of Najaf in Iraq.
Ten years later a civil war erupted in 2011 to remove Bashar, partly launched by displaced farmers who lost their livelihood due to the state’s water management policies.
In February 2017, as a professor, I sat on a kindergarten floor in San Diego, next to a Syrian child, named Mohammad, from the drought affected areas in Syria. It was part of an adult volunteer program to help him and other young refugees, including from Afghanistan, adapt to school in the U.S., our way of resisting Trump’s Muslim ban in that year.
I assume Mohammad, as a young man, is now celebrating. As a tutor to Syrian refugees at a grade school in City Heights, I helped Mohammad build a house from toy bricks.
Afterward he said, “Let’s destroy it like my house in Syria.” I assured him, “No. Nothing will happen to your new house.”
During the cleanup, I asked the staff if we could leave his toy house standing until we left the classroom. I took the boy to his father, waiting at the entrance, who told me that Mohammed’s new brother had just been born an hour ago.
I remember vividly the day my sister was born in 1982. I hope Mohammed remembers the person who built a house with him the day his brother was born.
I tell this story to students to illustrate that even if they felt powerless during the Syrian civil war or U.S. travel ban, there are always ways to find agency, to craft their own narrative rather than being apathetic.
There are Syrian Christians in San Diego who also belong to the Syriac Orthodox Church, historically the very first community to call themselves “Christians,” as opposed to Jewish followers of Christ. I did find members of my Lebanese Christian family. In fact, I learned my great uncle was the Patriarch of this church in the 1920s and ’30s.
The church is a living museum of Christianity. The liturgical language of the church is Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ. My family members inhabit a village in Syria called Maloula, one of the few places in the world where Aramaic is still spoken as a living language.
In 2013, I gave a lecture for the Kroc School of Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego, as the U.S. was about to bomb Syria for its alleged chemical weapon use during the civil war. At the Catholic University, during that lecture, I discussed Father Paolo D’Oglio, a Catholic Priest kidnapped in Syria, whose fate remains unknown to this very day.
After my lecture, members of the Syriac Orthodox church approached me, worried about the fate of their family in Syria. The rebels who seized Damascus Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) are primarily Islamist jihadists. They were active back in 2013 near Maloula. Now they are going to rule Syria. I imagine those Christians, more than a decade later, are apprehensive of their country’s future.
While some in San Diego are celebrating, others are apprehensive, Syria still faces a perilous future. The fall of Damascus is similar to the fall of Tripoli, Libya, in 2012. Libya soon witnessed the alliance of militias turn against each other, with the Islamic State reemerging there during the power vacuum. Libya fractured into multiple pieces, each held by militias.
It is not too difficult to imagine HTS or Turkey allowing the Syrian-Kurdish factions to endure as well as their quasi-state Rojava. The Kurdish elements will hold onto Rojava, having fought Islamic State for control of the upper Euphrates. Let’s hope both communities in San Diego can visit a stable Syria now.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at Cal State San Marcos and a visiting scholar at University of San Diego and San Diego State University. He will lection on “The Fall of the House of Assad and the Future of Syria, the Crises in the Middle East and Ukraine” at the University of San Diego, Manchester Auditorium, on Tuesday Dec. 10, from 5:30 p.m. to 7p.m.
