A dispatch on Syrians by the Sea for 1843 magazine

For The Economist’s 1843 Magazine I reported on Syrians rediscovering their country in the wake of the fall of the Assad regime, meeting soldiers, teens and families who could freely access the sea for the first time in over a decade, and for some the first time in their lives. It was a poignant change from my usual fare. Photographs by Gabriel Ferneini.

On December 8th 2024 Assad fled the country, and Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of the most powerful Islamist rebel group, assumed control. Regime checkpoints were abandoned. The soldiers who manned them melted away, leaving their uniforms discarded on the roadside. On the M4 motorway leading to the coast only the pockmarks left by shells suggest that it was recently a heavily guarded front line.

Rawaa Al-Rajab was from the central city of Homs, the heart of the uprising. The regime pummeled it over the course of several years, reducing her neighbourhood to rubble. Eventually rebels surrendered the city and al-Rajab, along with thousands of others, was put on a bus to northern Syria, where opposition forces still maintained control.

Throughout the war she was separated from her brother, Khaled. He had been working in a factory on the coast when the uprising started, and decided to stay there. It was risky for people in rebel-held areas to call people in regime strongholds – you never knew if Assad’s security forces were listening, so al-Rajab barely even spoke to her brother. “In all those years I heard my brother’s voice just twice,”  she said. “He called me once when my other brother died, and once when my husband died.”

When she heard the regime had finally fallen the first thing she did was to call Khaled. Two days later the 56-year-old was on the M4 highway to the coast. “It felt like flying,” she said. When I saw her she was sitting on a plastic chair on the black sand of Wadi Qandil beach with Khaled by her side; hijab on, shoes off and cigarette in hand. 

Al-Rajab was in her element, a matriarch holding court with four generations of her family gathered around the fold-up table they’d brought with them. It was piled with packets of potato chips and fruit in tupperware containers. She poured me some cardamom-laced coffee in a small ceramic cup, and we chatted.