When Sam Bari was just 10 years old, growing up in Damascus, he remembers when one of his mom’s friends told her about a recent protest, and how someone had spray-painted, “Your turn has come, doctor” in the city of Daraa.
At such a young age, he didn’t understand in 2011 the meaning behind the statement, but he does remember his mom looking “a little yellowish” when she heard about it.
Now 23, he has since come to know firsthand the violence, fear and displacement that came to define Syria for more than a decade — and that once-confusing note eventually made sense: The Syrian President Bashar Assad was a medical doctor; leaders of other Middle Eastern countries at the time were being challenged during the Arab Spring revolts, and in that moment, the people of Syria moved to challenge to their leader, too.
It wasn’t until early Sunday that the hope in that threatening message was finally realized. After a rebel movement plowed through government-held territory, the capital fell, The Associated Press reported. Assad reportedly fled to Moscow, and Syrians across the world are anxiously watching the country, wondering what will happen next.
For Bari, his hopes, fears and memories of Syria haven’t been far from the surface. Neither has that message to the “doctor.”
“A few months ago, that sentence just got stuck in my mind, and the image of my mom — the shock that she was in; the fear that appeared on her face,” Bari said.
His parents kept quiet around their son — Bari said in the Middle East, the saying is, “the wolves have ears” — so he researched what was happening to his country on his own. And from his family’s second-story apartment balcony, he remembers witnessing what he described as initially “fun” protests devolving into devastation.
“You could hear them all singing together, singing the same thing, and it’s very loud,” he remembered. “It has a special feel to it, because you see all these people united together against one thing, against a government that had been oppressing them for the past over 30 years. … They were wondering, ‘Is this the end?’”
Then the government started shooting people.
He remembers military members harassing residents. And he remembers his dad deciding it was time for their family to leave.
Bari and his parents, along with his sister and two brothers, left their home and relocated closer to an airport to prepare to flee. As a young boy, he remembers being crushed at having to leave his gaming PC behind, and now that he looks back, he still regrets not saying goodbye to his friends and family.
Some of them didn’t survive the war, and he sometimes feels survivor’s guilt because he did.
As his family drove from their home — away from Bari’s friends and cousins — they passed tanks on trailers being taken back to the family’s hometown.
“This was one of the most significant things I’ve ever seen,” Bari said. He can still picture it in his mind’s eye — as a kid, the massive machines were interesting to him.
Months later, when those tanks were used to destroy the places of his childhood, he started seeing them for what they were.
“They’re not a fun thing to see if you’re living in a place that’s run by a tyrant,” he said.
Even though he physically left Syria long ago and arrived in Utah in 2015, his life in the U.S. has been impacted by the violence in his home country.
“When you hear a bombing happening in your town, the first thing that you think about is these people, and then comes my house, and then comes my neighbors,” he said. “Every bomb or every bullet that was shot, it felt like we were there. We heard the shot and we were praying that it did not hit anybody that we love. We were always connected, we were always there.”
Looking back, looking ahead
Like Bari, Nour Bilal’s family fled from Syria relatively early in the conflict and were some of the first Syrian refugees to arrive in Utah.
In Syria, Bilal’s father was arrested sometime around 2011, and as soon as he was released in 2012, the family sent him to Lebanon for fear the government would persecute him again.
Bilal, now 24, said their prediction turned out to be right. Her dad registered with the United Nations, and the whole family was eventually brought here in November 2014.
Now that the Assad family is out of power, both Bilal and Bari are looking toward Syria with hope, but also concern.
(Nour Bilal) Nour Bilal's family arrived in Utah in November 2014 after fleeing Syria following her father's arrest there.
Bari said his father’s brother was arrested while the man’s wife was pregnant, and the family doesn’t know if he is alive or dead.
He said he has spent sleepless nights thinking about him, wondering if his uncle will meet his own daughter now that Saydnaya Prison — a sprawling complex long known as “the slaughterhouse,” just outside of Damascus — and others have been liberated, opening the possibility of families reuniting with people who disappeared under Assad’s regime.
“They’re releasing documents that contain names of people who’ve been freed from prisons over the past few days,” he said. “At the same time, they’re releasing documents of names of people who’ve been killed in the prisons.”
He plans to scour every list, concerned he will miss his uncle’s name if he’s not careful.
Bilal is grateful that her uncle who left the Syrian military — and couldn’t return home without worry he would be found or arrested at checkpoints — can now return to his city.
Like Bari, she’s also still hoping for good news about another uncle who was arrested in 2015. Her family heard he was dead, but she said others who were told the same thing about imprisoned relatives later learned that their loved ones were still alive.
Despite their hope, both Bilal and Bari are hesitant to believe their country is out of the woods.
“It feels like a dream come true, but that does not stop me from being worried about what we do next,” Bari said.
He hopes the country doesn’t glorify another leader. If there’s a president the people don’t like, he hopes they’ll be able to vote them out. Bilal has similar concerns.
“We’re happy now; this is great news. But in a couple months, things might go sideways because we don’t have a government,” she said. “Big countries might get involved.”
She wonders about President Donald Trump’s plans, referencing the travel ban he put into place on several Muslim-majority nations about a year after he first took office.
And she is worried about what will come of Israel’s latest actions in the country — and the possibility of extremists taking power in the current vacuum. Israel and the U.S. are conducting heavy airstrikes in the area; the U.S. is targeting Islamic State sites, according to U.S. officials, and Israeli authorities said they targeting “most of the strategic weapons stockpiles” in Syria to stop them from falling in the hands of extremists, The Associated Press reported.
Cautious about coming home
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sam Bari poses for a photograph in West Valley City, Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024. Bari was 10 years old when his family fled Damascus, Syria, in 2011 and arrived in Utah in 2015.
While some Syrian refugees near the country’s borders have been quick to return home, both Bari and Bilal said they are not as anxious to do so — and they don’t believe many of the more than 400 Syrian refugees who the Utah Department of Workforce Services has resettled here since 2012 are, either.
Bilal explained that, having earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, she hopes to pursue career opportunities here that she doesn’t think would be available to her if she went back.
She lives in a home that her parents own, with them and one of her two siblings, she said. She has a car here, and she’s engaged to an American.
“We were joking recently that we’re going to do our honeymoon in Syria,” she said. “It’s also very hard for him to go live there, because we will never be able to make U.S. money.”
Meanwhile, her cousin in Turkey told her that some people there were not waiting to see what the future holds before choosing to return home. That’s because, she explained, in many areas closer to Syria’s borders, some refugees who were forced to flee without their families ended up in more volatile situations than those who were able to come to the U.S.
“As soon as they’re freed, they were like, ‘We’re not waiting one second,’” she explained.
Bari, who also lives with his family, felt similarly, saying that it would make sense for people living in temporary housing to return to Syria as soon as they could after the Assad regime fell.
“It wouldn’t be a smart move,” he said, talking about himself and his family. “We’re uncertain where this is going.”
