With the toppling of the brutal regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, suburbanites with Syrian roots are filled with hope for a brighter future following his downfall.
“We’re still sort of in shock and disbelief that it happened as quickly as it did, but also that it happened as relatively without conflict as it did,” said Willowbrook resident Maya Atassi, co-executive director of the Chicago-based Syrian Community Network, which works with immigrants and refugees.
“This is a moment of celebration and a moment of hope,” said Atassi, who was born in the U.S. but whose family is from Syria.
“The road to democracy is always a process,” she said. “But I think right now, because there’s been so much trauma, so much death, so much violence over the last few years, they’re taking this final realization as a sign that there is hope to come.”
She remembers the last time she visited family in Syria in 2009.
“When we would go as children, Hafez (al-Assad), the father, was still president,” she said. “We would see his pictures and posters and flyers and statues everywhere. The adults would always be, like, make sure you don’t say anything, don’t ever look at those things, don’t point to them, don’t make comments.”
She had resigned herself to never going back to Syria.
“I hope that one day I will be able to return and visit and show my children the country where their grandparents came from and where I used to go as a child,” she said.
Fr. Samer Youhanoun of St. John The Baptist Syriac Orthodox Church in Villa Park said he hopes for peace now that Assad has lost power.
Youhanoun, who is from the northeast of Syria and serves parishioners mainly from Syria and Iraq, said Christians were persecuted with the onset of civil war in 2011.
“We couldn’t have any freedom like we have in the United States,” he said.
Abdulgany Hamadeh, a physician who grew up in Syria and who chairs The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, received his medical training in Damascus before coming to the U.S.
While living in Syria, he recalls always being watchful of his words and actions.
“This is, in my opinion, one of the most repressive regimes of the world, maybe similar to North Korea,” he said.
Some prisoners liberated after Bashar al-Assad’s ouster had been imprisoned for so long and were so isolated they thought Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad was still alive, according to reports.
Hamadeh said family members fled the political repression in Syria and scattered to Turkey, Europe and the U.S. Some fled in boats that sometimes capsized, causing them to nearly drown.
“We’re all joyful, but we’re all in disbelief,” he said. “Because, when the revolution started in 2011 and most people went against him, he used the ultimate power and military to suppress people, and people couldn’t say anything after that.”
But, he said, “When you keep suppressing a whole people, eventually they will not take it anymore. And that’s what’s happened here.”