Photographs of the dead lined the walls as a series of speakers took to a microphone to tell stories – interspersed with music – about Yarmouk Camp. Behind them, armed men from the interim government’s security forces peeked out of a blackened building. Unlike most others around, it was still standing.
“Long live Syria, long live Palestine,” called one speaker, after recounting some of the history of Yarmouk: the lengthy regime-inflicted siege that took place here; how residents were killed or forced into exile; how their former homes still lie in ruins. The Syrian revolution song Janna blasted from speakers after he finished.
All of this would have been unthinkable just months ago, before the exile of Bashar al-Assad and the fall of a regime that brutally ruled this country for more than half a century.
Yarmouk, in the capital Damascus, had a population of about 160,000 Palestinian refugees before 2011. In the years afterwards, it became infamous for suffering. It was the site of intense fighting between the regime and various factions, including, at one point, Islamic State.
In 2014, a photograph taken there went viral, showing thousands of people queuing for food aid surrounded by shattered buildings. It would become one of the defining images of a conflict believed to have killed as many as 620,000 people. By 2018, 80 per cent of Yarmouk was believed to be destroyed.
“We’re choosing this day because it’s the last week of Ramadan,” said Alaa’ Chahade (34), one of the event organisers and one of the few Yarmouk residents who has moved back home. She said the Syrian regime and its Iranian-backed allies used to “obstruct” the same street to do military parades. “We’re countering Iran and this narrative ... We, as the Palestinians, were deeply supporting revolution and the fall of Assad and the freedom of the Syrian people.”
Chahade is associated with an organisation called Palestinian House, which she said is an independent initiative of young people. They “don’t want any affiliation to any political party inside or outside the camp” – necessary because “there were a lot of violations here”.
Their event was one example of a series of recent efforts to reclaim spaces and bring people together around Syria’s capital. Months after the fall of the regime, many Syrians are still anxious about the future of their country, recognising that the traumas and divisions caused by war and authoritarian dictatorship are still far from behind them – the recent sectarian killings in Syria’s coastal areas acted as another sharp reminder.
But March also saw lots of civilian and community-organised events, including gatherings to commemorate the beginning of the Syrian revolution, as well as group iftars, the meal in which Muslims break their daily fast during Ramadan.
In the courtyard of the 18th-century Al Azem Palace, hundreds of people – mostly women and children with disabilities – gathered at sunset on Sunday March 23rd to eat dates, chicken, rice and chocolate eclairs.
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A representative from the Molham Volunteering Team, an organisation founded by Syrians in 2012 and named after a young man killed during the war, said they asked the ministry of culture if they could use the historic space. Because “they want to be seen as open to people at the moment ... they said yes”.
“After liberation it’s good to bring people together and make them feel free,” said Hussein Younso (35), a programme officer with Molham who lived in Turkey before Assad’s ousting. “You can see some kind of relief but it’s foggy now, because people still have memories of [being] under the control of the regime, so we try to make a new future now, [to show people] you can speak, you can go out.”
Another organiser was Lama Abo Haileh (30), who works with Molham and whose family live in Ireland. The chef was Malakeh Hazmat, who is usually based in Berlin and has more than 110,000 Instagram followers, but came back to spend a month helping people. Damascus appears “tired” to her now, she said, but “we tried to do something for our land”.
