A rare glimpse of the destruction in Damascus: “No one misses the previous regime”

“I have not met a single person, including among the minorities, who missed the previous regime,” he shares Jihad Yaziji (Jihad Yazigi) after a rare five-day visit to Damascus, his first visit to the Syrian capital in 13 years. Yaziji, an expert on the Syrian economy, the founder of the online economic news bulletin on Syrian affairs, “The Syria Report” and its editor, provides a unique glimpse into daily life in Damascus after the dramatic change the country underwent last December 8 with the fall of the Assad regime.

In a tweet he published yesterday on his X account, he describes Yaziji, a tired and tired, crowded and poor city. “The taxis I rode in were old, the clothes people wore looked worn, and very few of the city’s buildings had undergone any renovation in the last 13 years,” he writes. Instead of offering beef, the shawarma stalls serve only chicken shawarma – evidence of the difficult economic situation.

Despite the challenging economic situation, Yaziji reports a sense of hope sprouting at every site. “There is a difference between Syrians returning from abroad, who are full of joy and very optimistic about the future, and the local residents,” Yaziji differentiates. Return if the situation changes for the worse.”

Regarding public services, Yaziji reports that the situation in the city is even worse than before the fall of the Assad regime (which was bad even then). In particular, the electricity supply has declined since the cessation of oil supplies from Iran and areas under the control of the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) in northeastern Syria, and the Internet – for unknown reasons – is also down. The traffic on the roads is very congested during peak hours, but Yaziji points out that “the residents of Damascus start their day late, so before 10 am the traffic is relatively flowing.”

One of the most significant moments of Yaziji’s visit was the meeting with Ra’eed al-Tatri, a former pilot in the Syrian Air Force, who sat in a Syrian prison for 43 years, making him the oldest political prisoner in Syria, and perhaps even in the entire Arab world. “His eyes, voice and physical presence will stay with me for the rest of my life,” Yaziji wrote.

A question that came up again and again in the conversations that Yaziji heard was why the new Syrian leader, al-Jolani, has not yet addressed the local population, despite the fact that he has been interviewed by many Arab and European media, and many times. Among the explanations he received were “he does not want to make promises that he cannot keep; he is afraid that anything he says will anger a significant part of his supporters; the fact that he does not hold an official position in accordance with the Syrian constitution disqualifies him from speaking.”

In his words, Yaziji describes that the security situation in Damascus has undergone a significant change – almost no armed people are seen on the streets of the city, although the security checks remain in place. Later in his report, he outlines how there is a lot of civil activity in the city, with many events organized by civil society – a phenomenon that hardly exists in other cities in Syria. “The people inside the country are hungry for such events, as evidenced by the large number of participants,” Yaziji writes in his tweet. At the same time, he notes that this new reality evokes mixed reactions: many local residents with whom he spoke reported to him a feeling of “invasion” in view of the increasing flow of civil society activists from abroad.