'We're Going Home': Syrians in the Bay Area React to Assad's Fall With Cautious Joy

For the past two weeks, Maya Fallaha has been glued to her phone, watching for news from Syria.

Fallaha was born in the U.S. and grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula, with close ties to family in Aleppo and Idlib. She often shares memories with her 13-year-old son of childhood summers spent visiting family in Syria.

She was optimistic in the early days of the Syrian Revolution, a peaceful uprising against the government that began in March 2011. She hoped the protests might free the country from the brutal dictatorship of Bashar Assad, who has ruled the country since 2000. Instead, the country spiraled into a civil war.

“Syrians distributed roses and called for dignity and freedom. Assad sent them tanks,” Fallaha said. “We soon realized this regime would rather burn down the country than relinquish power.”

Then, on Nov. 29, rebel forces breached Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city. Fallaha spent the next two weeks watching the lightning offensive unfold. The regime fell on Dec. 8, marking an end to 54 years of Assad family rule.

“It’s a mix of apprehension and cautious optimism,” Fallaha told KQED on Dec. 9. “But I’m just so happy right now because this is the moment we’ve been waiting for for 14 years.”

Her parents, she said, who also live in California, have been waiting even longer.

“We’re rid of him.”

Syrians in the Bay Area and beyond have reacted to the end of the Assad family’s regime with a wide range of emotions — from shock and trepidation to cautious optimism and joy.

Nasser Meerkhan, who lives in San Francisco, said he felt the whole spectrum in one day, beginning first with pain.

“Today, I froze in bed for three hours, just reading. I thought I knew a lot about all of the horrible things happening [during the regime],” Meerkhan said. “But I learned even more.”

While Assad’s atrocities against his own people have been well documented, much less had been known about his “human slaughterhouses,” the more than 100 secret prisons where Assad and his father, former President Hafez Assad, banished suspected political rivals, often without charge. The most notorious of these was Sednaya Prison, near Damascus. Over the past few weeks, as rebel groups conquered more territory, crowds of civilians freed the prisons’ survivors, many of whom had been subjected to indiscriminate torture in underground cells for decades.

For Meerkhan, the liberation of thousands of political prisoners alone was reason to celebrate.

“I spent an hour dancing and laughing,” Meerkhan said. “And then, I spent the next half an hour crying my eyes out.”

For much of his adult life, Meerkhan believed that he would never return to Damascus, Syria’s capital, where he was born. Meerkhan is from a family of Syrian Kurds who hails from Damascus and Qamishli in Northeastern Syria, the Kurdish stronghold known as Rojava. In 2011, he moved to the U.S. for graduate school, just four days before the revolution started.

“I came to study, and I never went back,” said Meerkhan, now a UC Berkeley language professor.

Returning would have meant mandatory conscription into the pro-government forces, “which was never the plan,” he said. After two years of fighting, his immediate family fled. Meerkhan’s parents went to Turkey, and his siblings went to Germany.

Like many Syrians, Meerkhan said he had abandoned hope for change. “We buried our feelings to survive,” he said, “and now they’re all coming up.”

More than 6.5 million people have fled political violence in Syria since the war began in 2011. While the United States accepted far fewer refugees than Turkey and European states, California led early American resettlement efforts. The state settled an estimated 4,084 Syrian refugees between 2011 and Nov. 30, 2024, according to data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.

Bay Area cities like Oakland, Sacramento and Turlock welcomed hundreds of individuals and families escaping war and violence. Over the past fiscal year, the International Refugee Committee in Northern California said it helped resettle 139 Syrians in the region.

More refugees are in the pipeline, said Jordane Tofighi, the group’s deputy director, but the recent developments have left their future uncertain.

“We don’t know how this will be impacted by recent events or what this looks like with the incoming administration,” Tofighi said.

In 2017, former President Donald Trump introduced an executive order known as “the Muslim Ban.” It temporarily banned Syrian refugees and citizens from six other Muslim-majority nations and deemed the entry of Syrian nationals to the U.S. “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

The policy, widely criticized by civil rights groups as discriminatory, led to a precipitous drop in Syrian refugee admissions to the U.S., from a high of more than 12,587 in 2016 to just 76 in 2018, according to State Department data.

These numbers slowly rebounded during the Biden administration, which repealed Trump’s order and gradually increased refugee admissions to nearly 2016 levels. The U.S. has admitted more than 11,200 Syrians so far in 2024.

But with news of the collapse of the Assad regime, many European countries have begun suspending Syrian asylum claims. Austria has already prepared deportations of Syrian migrants, exploiting the country’s political upheaval to reverse a decade of immigration policies.

Based on his past policies and the rhetoric of his most recent campaign, Trump may try to do the same.

Tofighi urged people in the Bay Area to continue supporting resettlement in their communities and to resist unjust immigration policies.

“We’re very concerned by the threats to asylum seekers and that more restrictions will result in people going through more dangerous means of seeking safety — not going through the official entry points,” Tofighi said. “People will do whatever it takes to save their and their loved ones’ lives.”

Other questions about Syria’s future, like who will lead the country, remain.

Syria is fragmented among disparate armed factions, said Samer Araabi, a member of San Francisco’s Arab Resource Organizing Center. Regional powers like Iran, Turkey and Israel are all trying to assert their interests, as is the U.S.

Joseph Louis, who came to San Jose from the Syrian city of Homs 60 years ago, worries these interests could threaten Syria’s stabilization.

“We don’t know what’s behind these changes,” he said. “We just hope that things go back to peace. [Israeli airstrikes and advances into Syria’s territory] are bad for the Syrians and bad for the Palestinians.”

The coalition that led the overthrow of Assad is an Islamist group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The rebels originated as the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, according to Araabi, but severed ties. HTS’ militant leader, Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a, formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, said he has embraced a more moderate, inclusive stance.

“They’re inheriting a country that has basically collapsed,” Araabi said. “I’m waiting to see, are they dismantling the repressive apparatus of the state, or are they inheriting it?”

What this will mean for the region’s many different religious and ethnic communities, including Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Assyrian Christians, Armenians, Yezidis, Palestinians and, of course, women, remains to be seen. Millions of Syrians are still haunted by a legacy of persecution suffered at the hands of extremist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS.

“Of course, what’s coming might be concerning,” Meerkhan said. “There are many red flags. But [Assad’s regime] was a criminal system. Someone who creates these types of prisons, who kills thousands of people, is not any better. That is a radical government.”

Fallaha, from Belmont, urged people interested in learning more about the situation in Syria to do careful research.

“Russia has put billions into pro-Assad propaganda,” she said, emphasizing that many videos posted to social media may not be accurate.

But even as Syrians around the world continue to grapple with the enormity of recent events, many are celebrating what they hope will be a bright new chapter in Syria’s history.

In 2011, at the start of the Syrian Revolution, Fallaha said she participated in a solidarity protest while pregnant with her son. On Sunday, he joined her at an event in San Francisco’s Union Square to celebrate.

“He’s grown up knowing Syria only through pictures, through Facetimes,” Fallaha said. “When he heard the news, he said, ‘Mom, can we go to Syria this summer?’

“Inshallah, I will take you,” Fallaha told him. “We’re going home.”

Want to help Syrian refugees in the Bay Area?

Connect with the IRC for volunteer opportunities:

Oakland: VolunteerOak@rescue.org

Turlock: Volunteer.Turlock@rescue.org

San José: VolunteerSJ@rescue.org

Sacramento: VolunteerSacramento@rescue.org