Nizam Abazid is happily planning his first trip in decades to Syria, where he grew up. Rama Alhoussaini was only six years old when her family moved to the US, but she is excited about the prospect of introducing her three children to relatives they have never met in person.
They are among thousands of Syrian Americans in the Detroit area celebrating the unexpected overthrow of the Syrian government, which crushed dissent and jailed political enemies with impunity during the more than 50-year rule of deposed President Bashar Assad and his father before him.
“As of Saturday evening, the Assad regime is no longer in power,” Alhoussaini, 31, said through tears Tuesday at one of the Detroit-area school and childcare facilities her family operates. “And it’s such a surreal moment to even say that out loud because I never thought I would see this day.”
It may be some time before either of them visits Syria. While happy to see Assad go, many Western countries are waiting for the dust to settle before committing to a Syria strategy, including whether it is safe for the millions who fled the country’s civil war to return turn.
Ahmad al-Sharaa, who led the uprising that toppled Assad after an astonishing advance that took less than two weeks, has disavowed his group’s former ties to al-Qaeda and cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance. But the US still labels him a terrorist and warns against any travel to Syria, where the US has not had an embassy since 2012, the year after the war began.
But for Syrians in the US who have been unable to visit the country, the overthrow of the Assad government has given them hope that they can safely return, either for good or to visit the country.
“The end of the regime is the hope for the entire Syrian people,” Abazid said this week, days after Assad and his family fled to Russia.
Abazid said he could go to Syria anytime as he has dual American and Syrian citizenship, but he will wait a few months until things are settled there.
Although European leaders have said it is not yet safe enough to allow war-displaced refugees to return to Syria, Abazid said he and his brother are not concerned.
“When Assad’s forces were in power, my fate would have been in prison or beheaded,” Abazid said. “But now I don’t worry about that anymore.”
Many Syrians who immigrated to the US settled in the Detroit area. Michigan has the largest concentration of Arab Americans of any state and is home to the nation’s largest Arab-majority city, Dearborn. It also has more than 310,000 residents who are of Middle Eastern or North African descent.
As the rebels took control of Syria, sealing a meteoric advance that few thought possible even a month ago, Syrians in and around Detroit — like their counterparts around the world — followed along in disbelief as reports of flowed into one city after another. slipping from Assad’s grasp. When news broke that Assad’s government had fallen, celebrations erupted.
Abazid, who owns a cell phone company in Dearborn, was born in Daraa, about 60 miles south of the Syrian capital Damascus. He moved to the US in 1984 at the age of 18, and although he has returned a few times, he has not been back since 1998 because of what he described as “intimidation” by Syrian intelligence. That trip had to be closely coordinated with U.S. authorities, as he said Syrian authorities took him into custody during a 1990 visit and held him for more than six months.
“When I was kidnapped from the airport, my family didn’t even know what it was about,” he told the Associated Press on Tuesday. ‘I still don’t know the reason. I have no idea why I was kidnapped.”
Abazid, 59, said his parents have died since that 1998 trip, but his five sisters still live in Syria. Each of his four brothers left Syria in the 1970s and 1980s, including one who has not returned since emigrating 53 years ago, shortly after Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, came to power.
Alhoussaini, who lives in West Bloomfield Township, said she was born in Damascus and moved to the Detroit area as a young girl, “mainly because there was nothing left for us in Syria.”
She said that under the Assad family’s rule, her grandfather’s land was seized. Authorities held him for almost a month. Her father was also detained before the family left.
“There never had to be a reason,” Alhoussaini said. “My father was able to return once, in 2010. And since then he has not been able to return to his home country, mainly because we spoke out against the Assad regime when the revolution started in 2011. And we have attended many protests here. We talked about it on social media and did a lot of interviews.”
But now that Bashar Assad is gone and Syria is in the hands of the rebels, we no longer have to be afraid to visit our country, she said.
Her father, 61, is considering a trip to Syria to see his siblings and visit his parents’ graves. Alhoussaini said she and her husband, who is from the northern city of Aleppo, want to take their children to visit family and friends.
Alhoussaini’s three sisters, aged 40, 34 and 29, were also born in Syria. But none of them have returned.
Now there is hope and amazement that people in Syria can celebrate in the streets, she said.
Alhoussaini said she thinks people born and raised in the U.S. won’t be able to fully identify because Americans enjoy a freedom of expression that people in Syria never had.
“You can say whatever you want. You can go out into the streets and protest against whoever you want,” she said. “You won’t be held for it. You won’t be killed for it.’
