Men walked hurriedly across the border at Al Bukamal on Dec. 26, visibly exhausted but eager to get home. For some, over a decade had passed since they had last seen relatives, homes and land they once farmed.
One carried his dusty, cheap Chinese-made bag on the back of his neck, hunched and sweating profusely despite the winter chill.
“I was in prison and then left Homs three years ago,” he said, before haggling for a seat in a vehicle going to Damascus. He added that he had worked in Baghdad since then but that there was no longer any reason not to return now, as “Syria is finally free.”
The driver of the vehicle said that between 150 and 200 Syrian civilians crossing the border every day from Iraq head to the Syrian capital, crowded inside minivans like his, their bags secured with ropes on top. The trip costs $50.
There were no computers to check their names, no one to stamp a passport or demand a bribe. A concrete structure where previously a border official would have sat stood empty, random documents from years before lay on the ground near buildings surrounded by trash and discarded military fatigues.
Now emptied of foreign militias once considered immovable despite years of sporadic U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, this area of Syria close to the Iraqi border contains street upon street of destroyed homes. Laughing, happy children wave at the security vehicles when they pass, chanting and singing.
“Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” slogans long beloved of Iran and its allied forces across the region, and here until recently, adorn many walls.
America is still present across the Euphrates, supporting Kurdish-led forces “occupying” Arab land, residents here say. And Israel has seized the opportunity, amid Syria’s attempt to open up to the world and remain stable and sovereign at the same time, to move into areas of Quneitra province “for security reasons.”
There is no great love of the U.S. or Israel here, but neither is there any desire for conflict with either.
This western part of Deir ez-Zor province contains not only the key border city of Al Bukamal but also the regional capital further north, home to a population considered more educated than those hailing from poorer, oil-rich areas further to the east — areas that are “not yet liberated,” as residents here say. Those educated classes, for the most part, left long ago for Europe, the Gulf, or elsewhere.
Multiple schools and mosques stand empty and damaged. Electrical wiring and water pumps have been stolen from government buildings and private properties, local residents say — as have lives, years and opportunities.
Military vehicles that broke down on the way to the border, when thousands of Syrian soldiers and allied forces fled to Iraq, line the road, but no one here wants them: It’s not weapons or a military that we need, residents say, it’s everything else. The time of fighting, of that enormous smothering burden of violence and fear, of prisons and oppression, is over, they add. That burden has been lifted off the backs of these people.
“The Iranian militias carried what they could with them and destroyed much of what they couldn’t” when they crossed into Iraq, according to the local commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
HTS led the lightning advance on the capital, starting from its stronghold in the northwestern province of Idlib on Nov. 27 and culminating, through coordination with southern factions and HTS cells activated months before in other areas of the country, with the essentially bloodless takeover of Damascus on Dec. 8.
The years of governing Idlib and mistakes made and rectified, largely out of sight of an international community that continued to see the province as nothing more than an incubator of terrorism until its armed force ended up in power in Damascus, are now forming the basis for decisions made by the new government.
Pragmatism and willingness to listen to and engage with all parties have thus far marked HTS’ approach, though many remain suspicious.
The HTS commander in Al Bukamal, Abdullah Salman Hussein — better known as Abu Radwan — told me in a Dec. 26 interview in the city that he was originally from Deir ez-Zor province. He had been put in charge of the area 10 days prior. Before the 2011 uprising, he had worked both as a preacher at a local mosque and as an employee at military housing units.
His home area to the north is still under the control of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and he cannot go back unless those forces leave, he noted. Prior to being assigned to Al Bukamal, he had been tasked with an area in the northwestern province of Idlib.
He arrived in the city to find “life destroyed here.”
“People are happy, of course,” he noted, due to the liberation of the area, but “there is nothing left. There is a need for hospitals and help for the people here.” Some don’t even have bread to eat.
After thousands of Syrian regime and allied forces fled, anything of potential value in Al Bukamal “was taken by the SDF in the few days they were here after the Iranians and the regime handed the city over to them,” he claimed. “Computers, electronic devices, medical equipment,” he noted. “They took all of it.”
“The Iranians,” he said — referring to all Iran-backed groups present in Syria, including ones with Iraqi and Afghan fighters — “made an agreement with the SDF” to enter the key cities of Al Bukamal and Deir ez-Zor.”
Weapons depots remain scattered across the district. In one, I found and photographed dozens of Soviet-era, “high-explosive fragmentation” mortar projectiles and an Iranian anti-tank, recoilless gun projectile, identified with the assistance of N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services.
HTS fighters now guard these depots but are well aware that these are not what the population want or need and are scrambling to do what they can to help meet their requirements, they say.
“Iranian militias had many bases” in the area “and opened secret border crossings that not even the (Syrian) regime knew about. The SDF wanted to establish itself here, but the local community rejected this,” Abu Radwan said. “If they hadn’t left, the people would have protested and pushed them out with force, with weapons.”
The SDF “even stole water pumps to take them to Qandil or Qamishli,” he added in apparent disgust, referring to a mountainous area in northern Iraq under the control of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a Kurdish-majority city in northeastern Syria near the border with both Turkey and Iraq.
The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., EU and Turkey. It is also officially considered a banned organization in Iraq as of last year.
Abu Radwan doesn’t believe the SDF wants to create a state. “They damage the country. They damage its infrastructure,” he said. “Even water, electricity,” he added. “They wanted to leave us with nothing at all.”
Over recent weeks, I have heard dozens of Syrian youths, women, civil society activists, military men and sheikhs from the region repeat variations of the same sentence: Not all of Syria is liberated yet, and they want “Syria to be one again”— no longer fragmented, no longer divided by ethnicity or religion.
“I don’t want anyone to be asked that question — ‘Are you Sunni or Shiite or Druze or Christian?’ — again. We are all Syrians. That’s all, and that’s what it should be,” one commander of the Syrian National Army (SNA), originally from Deir ez-Zor, told me in Damascus. He, too, cannot return to his hometown as long as the SDF remains in control of the area.
The SNA is supported by Turkey and contains multiple factions composed largely of young men from Arab-majority areas of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa currently under SDF control. HTS fighters seem more willing to engage with the SDF, as the areas the former controlled before the recent takeover were neither contiguous with SDF ones nor subjected to car bombings and other attacks by the SDF.
But within the Deir ez-Zor communities displaced and fighting for years to simply go home, wounds run deep — against the Islamic State group, against the former regime and against the SDF.
This year marks 13 years since I first spoke to Deir ez-Zor residents who rose up against the regime and 10 years since I first interviewed those who fled to Turkey following the Islamic State’s takeover of the province.
Two months after it captured Mosul in June 2014, the group then proceeded to massacre hundreds, possibly thousands, of a single tribe’s men and boys in the eastern part of the province. Mass graves of these Arab men in SDF areas have not yet been exhumed or studied. I reported on the massacre and stayed in contact with members of this tribe and many others, including young men who had fled but stayed in contact with their relatives trapped under the Islamic State’s rule.
One young man’s brother would engage in Skype conversations with him and me late into the night, despite the risk that the Islamic State might find out and kill him. When some of his relatives finally managed to escape, they said they were forced to pay bribes to members of the SDF to get their ID cards back and to get out of a camp in which they were treated as de facto prisoners.
In the almost six years since I first reported from Deir ez-Zor in early 2019, after the Islamic State was pushed out, all the residents I interviewed have stated that the SDF is controlled by “cadres from Qandil” — PKK operatives of both Syrian and foreign origin.
The fact remains, however, that the SDF controls much of the northeastern part of the country and that the U.S. continues to support it and see it as its most trustworthy partner in the region.
As of late January, the province remains split into two parts: Broadly speaking, most of the eastern bank of the Euphrates River remains under SDF control while the western bank is now under the new Syrian government.
The HTS-led offensive in its northwestern stronghold of Idlib, which began on Nov. 27 and led to the takeover of the capital on Dec. 8, has been followed by a flurry of high-level meetings and negotiations.
Whether the SDF will be forced to disband and its members will simply join the new government’s military, or whether the region currently under SDF control will be granted some sort of autonomy with its own armed faction intact, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, some farmers from the area are coming back. Two young men I met in the vicinity of a former base used by Iran-linked militias near Al Bukamal said that this was the first time since 2017 that they would be able to farm the land.
Nearby were several buildings, one of which had clearly been destroyed by an airstrike. Others still contained weapons and had the names of Shiite “martyrs” painted on them. Along a road leading north, apparently unguarded, was an Iranian artillery rocket.
Those returning to their farmland have to contend with the possibility of landmines, which seem especially prevalent in areas further north but are strewn across much of this heavily contested land. Dozens have been killed by landmines in recent days in the province, including members of the security forces.
The educated class has not yet come back, either to the regional capital of Deir ez-Zor or to the border city of Al Bukamal. It seems unlikely that they will anytime soon: Many cannot leave the countries they have sought refuge in for a variety of reasons or cannot return without losing their hard-earned right to asylum if they were to decide to try their luck in mine-strewn and rubble-pocked territory. Internet connections are unreliable and slow across most of the country, making work requiring reliable access exceedingly difficult. Compounding this are electricity and water shortages, dismally low salaries and runaway inflation — forcing one to carry wads of local currency to pay for a single coffee.
Nonetheless, some are coming back for limited stays and urging greater attention to this part of the country. One native of Al Bukamal, whom I met with in early January in Damascus, said that he had been granted a meeting with Syrian interim leader Ahmad al-Sharaa.
Widely traveled and accompanied by his wife, the man asked that his name not be used but noted that between 2011 and 2013 he had fought with a local armed group whose leader later joined the Islamic State and is believed to be in an Iraqi prison. He said that he had left when he saw extremism getting the upper hand and that his main concern, despite having no intention to return to live in Syria any time soon, is for the state to be secular.
He said one of the three priorities he discussed with Syria’s new leader was to give Deir ez-Zor the importance it deserved as a province but never received under the Assads, who, he claimed, wanted to keep the population near the country’s oil and other natural resources poor, uneducated and powerless.
Since the HTS-led takeover of most of the country, much concern has been voiced by the international community and Syrian civil society about possible acts of vengeance or the targeting of minorities, which were long seen as having enjoyed preferential treatment from the former regime.
Thus far, such incidents seem isolated. The current government seems to be quietly taking action against perpetrators, though a culture restrained by decades of heavy-handed media restrictions means it is difficult to ascertain facts on the ground in a timely manner.
Following an initial open-door policy for journalists in the first few weeks, the authorities have instated a time-consuming procedure to obtain limited, one-week media permissions, which often requires paying a local journalist to follow up on requests at the media ministry. Syrian civil society activists have called for the abolition of the ministry itself, which seems an anachronistic remnant of the former regime and effectively gives bloggers and tourists more access to the country and opportunities to “report” on it than professional journalists, who are required to abide by a code of ethics.
In any case, “No one will be prosecuted for simply being in the military,” Abu Radwan stressed in the lengthy interview at an HTS office in Al Bukamal, repeating what multiple HTS officials have said.
“But there are people who killed, people who created mass graves, who committed many crimes,” he said, noting that some of these crimes were documented or can be verified by witnesses. “We need to bring those that committed the crimes before courts. It is not my right to pardon them. Those that have the right can forgive them or not,” he stressed. “It’s up to them.”
As for women’s roles in the Syria of the future, the HTS commander noted that the country needs educated women, “female engineers and doctors,” and that he hoped that one of his daughters would become a doctor as well.
Their participation in the building of Syria is a goal of the revolution itself, he said.
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