What Did the World Learn From Syria?

Opinion|What Did the World Learn From Syria?

In the years after the Syrian revolution, as the country unraveled, I would ask two questions of the Syrians I met — inside Syria or displaced, regardless of when or why they left. “Was it worth it? What were we supposed to have learned from all that had happened, from all that had transpired between us?”

I posed this question to a Syrian in Gaziantep, Turkey, in 2023. Yusef had movie star looks and, at 27 years old, had already lived multiple lives. He dropped out of school in Aleppo at 12 to work in a glass factory. When the revolution started a couple of years later, he at first took part in the protests, but later joined an armed Islamist group — a response, he said, to seeing Bashar al-Assad’s forces open fire on the unarmed civilians who were demanding reforms of the regime. He told me he had his arm and leg blown off in a rocket attack, and was assumed dead until he started to stir and was fished out of a black plastic bag on the sidewalk.

Yusef never fought again. In Turkey he had a small shop and volunteered in aid and relief. When I met him, an earthquake had recently destroyed his house and shop, and he was considering trying to reach Europe. He didn’t have the money yet, and he acknowledged that his rudimentary prosthetics would probably not serve him well if the boat capsized. Besides, he admitted, he really couldn’t swim.

I asked him the questions. He took a drag from his cigarette and said, with a bitterness that I had come to recognize, “We taught the world. We taught them that if you are not fit to do something, don’t do it.”

“Hamdallah,” praise be to God, he said, “we are now a lesson.” As if, at least that.

In 2023, no one could have blamed him for his pessimism. After all, at the start of the Arab Spring, when nationwide protests erupted in Syria demanding reforms, and later — when it became clear reforms weren’t coming — Mr. al-Assad’s ouster, the regime had offered Syrians an infamous choice: Mr. al-Assad, or we burn the country. Then, of course, Mr. al-Assad stayed and set Syria alight.

For more than a decade, Mr. al-Assad remained in power, employing vicious means to do so while enjoying an obscene amount of impunity. In recent years he was even beginning to be welcomed back to an international community eager to move on and to return Syrian refugees, despite clear evidence that Syria was not safe.