Saeed Arida loves Syria -- its food, its culture, its history. But he hasn’t been back in about twenty years. However, Arida’s now making plans for a visit -- after the shockingly sudden overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“This was completely inconceivable just two weeks ago. I mean impossible,” he said. “What we built in our head as this regime that was so entrenched to just disappear into thin air?”
The al-Assad regime had been entrenched in Syria for more than fifty years. Bashar al-Assad assumed the presidency in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad -- who took power in the early 1970s.
“There was a lot of oppression of free speech,” Arida said. “The whole system was based on fear. You did not know whether that’s exactly real or not. It’s just that they created this culture of fear.”
Human rights organizations said the feeling of fear was warranted -- with the al-Assad regime jailing, torturing and killing tens of thousands of Syrians over the years -- even using chemical weapons on the population.
“I have an aunt who has a son who was taken away when he was eighteen,” Arida said. “And we still have no idea where he is. There are no records. There is nothing. At some point, there is also relief in knowing that he passed or something happened.”
To that end, many Syrian families are now looking for answers at some of the country’s most notorious prisons, where al-Assad jailed political opponents, many of whom have now been liberated.
Arida escaped Syria in the early 2000s, after finishing studies at a university in Damascus. He was accepted into a graduate program at MIT and remained in the Boston area. Today, he is Founder and CEO of the private NuVu High School in Central Square. He, like many other local Syrians, watched in joyous disbelief the liberation of their country.
“We’re still trying to process that it actually ended,” he said. “We are kind of trying to suspend disbelief. This is a dictatorship that lasted 55 years and it’s gone, so we just want to celebrate that moment. I think anything that’s going to come next is going to be better than what we had before, absolutely.”
Mahmoud Elsayed shares that hope. He came to the US about a dozen years ago, just after ‘The Revolution’ against al-Assad began. He now owns Tarboosh Pizza and Grill in Brighton.
“It’s been a cancer that’s been there for 50 years,” he said. “This is done now. We’re looking for a brighter future for Syria.”
Elsayed calls the overthrow of al-Assad the ‘longest, fastest thing that’s happened.’
“It was unbelievable. It’s such a relief,” he said. “I can’t describe the feeling. I want to cry. I want to laugh. I feel like I’m... released.”
Elsayed said Syrians back home have been oppressed for so long that they may not even understand the concept of freedom of speech.
“They have a voice,” he said. “They can say yes or no, they can choose what’s going to happen next and if they don’t like it they can change it.”
At least that is the hope. Though it is unclear at this point what the new government in Syria will look like -- given the disparate groups fomenting al-Assad’s overthrow.
But that is a concern for another time, said Arida.
“We are full of questions we are full of hope,” he said. “The honeymoon for us at least is going to continue a lot longer than just a few days.”
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