Half a year after the victory of Syria’s revolution, the deep rifts in society left behind by five decades of dictatorship are making themselves felt.
The mood following the toppling of longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8, 2024, was one of unrestrained joy. Almost 14 years after the first mass protests against his rule broke out, a sudden offensive by Syria’s leading rebel groups — confined for years to the northwestern enclave of Idlib — saw the Syrian regime crumble. First, Aleppo fell, then Hama and then Damascus. Exuberant civilians filled the streets as the prisons were emptied, finally free of the tyrannical rule of the Assad family after 54 years.
The months since have brought reasons for optimism, chief among them the lifting of some Western sanctions and the ability to gather in the streets without facing arrest or torture. But they have also brought somber reminders of the depth of the problems Syria still faces, like sectarianism, long a tool used to divide and rule by the Assad regime and only worsened by a decade and a half of conflict. In early March, an uprising by pro-Assad elements on Syria’s coast — home to the country’s Alawite minority, from which the Assad family and most of the former military elite hailed — resulted in Sunni Arab militants carrying out brutal reprisal massacres against Alawite villages. The next flare-up happened in the southern province of Sweida, dominated by the Druze minority, which had enjoyed a sort of de facto autonomy since the mid-2010s. Clashes between Druze militias and Sunni Bedouin tribes in mid-July spiraled into government intervention, heavy Israeli airstrikes (on government troops) and summary executions on both sides. All the while, Syria’s Kurds have watched with unease from the sidelines, loath to surrender their weapons or self-rule in a possible portent of a new minority conflict.
Yet lost amid the eye-grabbing headlines is the simpler, quieter progress being made in many areas of the country — even those dominated by minorities. One city in particular stands out: Salamiyah.
Sitting at the western edge of the Syrian desert, Salamiyah is a dusty and relatively nondescript city in many ways. It does not boast the architectural marvels and monuments of the country’s larger urban centers, nor was it the site of any of the fierce battles that drove many obscure towns to prominence during the civil war. But it is precisely this latter fact that, combined with the city’s religious and sectarian makeup, makes Salamiyah noteworthy.
“Salamiyah was the first non-Sunni-majority city to rise up against Assad, and the first one to be liberated during the final offensive,” says Ola al-Jundi, a 51-year-old local activist. Like many from Salamiyah, al-Jundi is Ismaili, belonging to a Muslim sect that diverged from mainstream Shiite Islam more than a millennium ago. The Ismailis, who are most commonly associated with the Fatimid Caliphate and the Hashashin (Assassins) Order, have made Salamiyah their primary home in Syria since the mid-19th century. Today, Salamiyah is the largest center of Ismailis in the Arab world.
They are not the city’s only residents, however. Of a population of perhaps 100,000, locals estimate that only half are Ismaili: The other residents are roughly evenly split between Sunni Muslims, Syria’s dominant group, and Alawites. Despite this, the city has avoided sectarian massacres and large-scale conflict from the beginning of the civil war until the present.
That does not mean, however, that it avoided the crackdowns on the anti-Assad protests that broke out against the government in 2011. As one of the first cities to demonstrate against Assad, Salamiyah was also one of the first to suffer the reprisals.
“The protests in Salamiyah began on March 25, the day the revolution truly began,” al-Jundi says proudly. “We saw that other countries in the Arab world had risen up, and we wanted the same rights for ourselves. But we wanted to do it the right way. From the very start, I was coordinating the signs we would bring to the protests. They had to be specific, with political demands only. We would not have any religious or sectarian slogans,” she says.
After decades of fear, the feeling of freedom in those early days was intoxicating. “At the first protest, we were still quiet, still scared,” al-Jundi says. “Then at the second one, after the mukhabarat (secret police) had not arrested us all, we gained a little more courage. On the third protest, I began shouting, demanding the right to speak about politics openly in this country. It was on a street that we would previously not even dare to speak quietly on. After that, I never wanted to lose this feeling again,” she says.
The Assad regime responded calmly at first. A few counterprotests were organized, with demonstrators brandishing portraits of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez. By May, the first arrests had been made, but the protests continued to grow over the summer. It was this growing momentum that led the regime to turn to harsher methods.
“They first attacked the protests in Hama,” al-Jundi says, referencing the military crackdown in that nearby city, the provincial capital, in July 2011. “Then they deployed troops here. They began arresting everyone.”
At this time, the first organized armed resistance to the regime was emerging. To attempt to keep the country’s minorities on its side, the government turned to sectarian propaganda.
“The regime tried to tell us that the revolutionaries were all jihadists,” al-Jundi says. “Their informers and agents would tell us that Sunni Islamists want to force hijab on us, to take our daughters out of school. They wanted us to be against each other, instead of against them,” she says.
Al-Jundi herself was first arrested in March 2012 and held for five days before being released. After two more arrests in as many months, she decided to flee the country — for the sake of her children, more than herself. She went to Lebanon, where she would remain for the next 12 years.
As the Assad regime’s grip on the country loosened, Salamiyah found itself thrust into a strategic position. Sections of the M5 highway, the crucial motorway connecting the Syrian capital Damascus with the country’s second city, Aleppo, fell into rebel hands. This left Salamiyah as the only node connecting the regime-held half of Aleppo city with the capital and the coast, via a remote desert road. As a key regime lifeline in a battle that could decide the war, the city seemed primed to become a rebel target and the next urban battlefield. Yet the battle never came, a result, at least in part, of efforts by local rebel fighters to keep the city off the target list.
Salamiyah was not a major source of rebel manpower as the armed opposition grew in 2012, but it did produce fighters. Abu Hassan, a native of a village on the city’s outskirts, is one of them. (Abu Hassan is his nom de guerre; as a member of the new government’s General Security Service, he is not authorized to speak to reporters.)
“There were only 10 or 15 of us in the early days,” Abu Hassan says, speaking of the small coterie of friends with whom he joined Syria’s rebels. “We were hiding out on a farm, with only one rifle between us at the start. We relied on food from the local villagers to survive,” he says.
Abu Hassan and his comrades soon joined Liwa al-Farouq — an Islamist group formed in central Syria — among “maybe 200 people” from Salamiyah and its environs to join the rebels, he says. His first battle was in February 2013, in an assault on the regime-held city of Tabqa.
“The fear was almost unbearable,” he says of that first taste of combat. “We lost a lot of people in those early fights, but those who survived gained experience.” He would soon take part in campaigns across northwestern Syria, one of the fiercest theaters of the civil war.
As the battle for Aleppo raged, some rebel groups agitated for an assault on Salamiyah. Abu Hassan says that he and other locals argued against such an action — successfully, as it would turn out.
“There were some who wanted to attack Salamiyah, to oust the regime and cut them off” from Aleppo, he says. Abu Hassan, who is himself from a mixed Sunni-Ismaili family, was concerned about some of the other rebel groups, including those who hailed from extremist backgrounds in other parts of the country, as well as foreign fighters. “Not all of the factions were as tolerant in their views. Salamiyah is a minority area, and we did not want the extremist factions to access it. We managed to convince our brothers to leave it alone,” he says.
In the meantime, other locals were plying their influence on the other side of the conflict, working as they could to keep Assad’s army away from Salamiyah — and Salamiyah residents away from the army.
Like the rest of Syria, they were subject to mandatory military service, always an unpleasant and degrading experience that emphasized loyalty to the ruling family over any military utility. Zeino Zeino was 24 and halfway through his service when the first demonstrations erupted in Damascus, where his unit was stationed.
“I was already against the regime, for three or four years at this time, but I never believed we would see something like this,” Zeino says of the protests. “It was incredible. I took a weekend away and attended one. At this point, I already knew I had to do what I could to bring down this regime,” he says.
As the revolution spread, Zeino made plans to defect once conditions allowed. A friend of his was of like mind, but with a bolder plan. “At this point, the regime was using a special unit to crush protests,” Zeino says. “They were moving from city to city, so we decided to make an ambush. We waited for them on the highway from Deir ez-Zor to Tadmor, in July 2012. Once they approached, we attacked. We had only light weapons, but we still made some serious damage,” he says.
Zeino and his team carried out two more ambushes on regime forces over the summer. In the third and final one, they were themselves taken by surprise by government reinforcements — a development that led to his friend’s death.
“I had to bury him myself in the desert and then tell his mother what had happened,” Zeino says. “It was the worst day of my life. After this, I threw down my weapon and said that I will never touch a gun again, because if I pick one up again, my anger and desire for revenge will make me do anything. So I resolved to transfer all my energy, all my strength, to help the revolution by peaceful means,” Zeino says.
Abandoning the battlefield, Zeino went back to Salamiyah, where he would live in hiding for the next 12 years. Changing his appearance and using a fake name, he began to use his contacts still in the army to help others defect.
“Everyone knows that anything and anyone can be bought in Assad’s Syria, even in the military,” Zeino says. “So when someone would contact me, wanting to defect, I would gather some money to bribe a commander in his unit so that he could go on leave. Then we would contact people from the opposition, tell them that a defector is coming, so that he can do it safely. By my count, I helped 63 people leave the army in this way,” he says.
Zeino managed to have this effect despite being a lower-ranking member of the army. Among the officers above him, other Salamiyah locals were making their own efforts.
Qusai al-Jaraky, 57, is now a member of Salamiyah’s Ismaili Council, a spiritual and secular community body that has existed in the city since 1920. Before joining it a few years ago, he was a career military man, serving in the air force, the same branch from which Hafez Assad himself had risen to power.
“I first joined the military in 1988,” al-Jaraky says. “At that time, being an officer was seen as a respectable position. Of course, this was not the case in reality. The military was very corrupt, abusive and sectarian. But it was my career, so I stayed with it,” he says.
By the time the 2011 protests broke out, al-Jaraky had risen to the rank of major, based in the Damascus satellite town of Qatana. Before long, his unit was asked to take part in dispersing them. At significant risk to himself, al-Jaraky demurred.
“I managed to use procedural issues as an excuse for a while, saying that ‘there is no direct order to use live ammunition’ and such things,” he says. “It worked for a time, but I was called in for questioning multiple times. The regime began to doubt my loyalty, but they did not arrest me, perhaps because they did not want to alienate my community” of Ismailis, he says.
Pressure on his family increased, as did thinly veiled threats. One day, al-Jaraky arrived back at his home to find a tank parked next to it, frightening his two young daughters. He sent them back to live with other family members in Salamiyah, but his wife was barred by the regime from leaving Damascus as military operations intensified.
“At this point, the siege of East Ghouta was ongoing,” says al-Jaraky, of the intense combat between the regime and rebels entrenched in the capital’s eastern suburbs. “I managed to help smuggle weapons and aid in to help the opposition there. I knew some of the government soldiers manning the checkpoints,” he adds.
With his loyalty in question, al-Jaraky was eventually transferred to a bureaucratic position. He attempted to resign from the army multiple times, but his resignation was finally accepted in 2022. Moving back to his hometown, he joined the Ismaili Council, eventually playing a role in the end of Assad’s rule that brought his story full circle.
As Syria’s rebels launched what would be their final offensive last November, they quickly overran regime defences, capturing Aleppo in days and moving in on Hama city. As they moved through the desert, rebel fighters approached Salamiyah.
But there would be no battle here. The city was already waiting for them. “We were already in contact by the time they were nearing the city,” al-Jaraky says. “The Ismaili Council coordinated everything. We told them the location of the regime checkpoints, where they could enter the city. That night, Dec. 5, they entered under cover of darkness. The regime soldiers either ran away or surrendered — there was no blood,” he says.
Abu Hassan was on the other side. With growing excitement and a sense of surreal disbelief, he watched as the regime defences in northern Syria crumbled. He took part in the talks for the peaceful handover of Salamiyah before entering it himself on Dec. 6, one day later.
“During 10 years, I had not felt fear until that last week,” Abu Hassan says. “As we moved closer to taking Hama, all I could think was, I can’t die now, now that we are so close. Then we captured the city and I was going back to Salamiyah, to a home and a family I never thought I would see again. I cried the entire way back,” he says.
Al-Jundi was also not long in returning from exile. Just days after Assad’s flight from the country on Dec. 8, she crossed the Lebanese border, heading back to Salamiyah.
“All these years, I was in Chtoura, just a few kilometers from Syria,” al-Jundi says. “But it might as well have been a million miles away. It still feels surreal that I am back here. I have to remind myself that I am not dreaming,” she says.
In the months since the regime’s fall, Salamiyah’s residents have not been idle. The city has long had a strong tradition of civil society, thanks in large part to the Aga Khan Foundation — the philanthropic arm of the wealthy Ismaili spiritual leader, the Aga Khan, who has invested heavily in Salamiyah. Other groups, like the Ismaili Council, have continued their activities, while new ones have been born. Discussion groups, where locals can describe their concerns and their hopes, are convened regularly alongside local notables, who then travel to Damascus for talks with the new authorities. There is a conscious effort to get buy-in from all segments of Salamiyah’s population, whether Ismaili, Sunni or Alawite.
Above all, continuing Salamiyah’s strong tradition of avoiding bloodshed and sectarianism remains paramount. If the new Syria is to be a success story, perhaps Salamiyah is what it will look like.
“We did not let the regime divide us all these years,” al-Jundi says. “The worst part of the struggle is over, but we still have much work to do. We must not lose all that we have gained as we build the country we have always wanted.”
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