Return to Damascus

Editor’s Note: Since the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, many exiled Syrians have returned home for the first time in years. Palestinian-Syrian writer Ahmad Diab is one of these returnees. Visiting his mother, sister and brother in Syria for the first time in 15 years, he recorded his return with videos of the first flight from Doha to Damascus, of impromptu singing and dancing in the Havana Café and of a quiet city street in the Yarmouk Camp district of Damascus. For Ahmad, his experience returning to Syria offers a meditation on what it means to be a Palestinian-Syrian with a double exile and double return. 

At the Bottom of Return

“Your flight to Dammam will begin boarding in 40 minutes.”

“No,” I replied, savoring the words, “this is the flight to Damascus.” Rarely does a correction bring such joy.

The Qatar Airways agent hesitated, his confusion justified. DMM, DAM—so similar in code, yet worlds apart in fate. Doha to Dammam was routine, a rhythm uninterrupted. But a flight to Damascus? That was an anomaly, a breach in the fabric of the last fourteen years.

This was the first commercial flight into a post-Liberated Syria, and I was going to be on it.

The moment the first flights were announced, I opened the Qatar Airways app. My heart sank—Damascus wasn’t listed. But exile teaches urgency. I messaged the airline directly. “Yes,” they confirmed, “flights resume January 7th. You can book now.”

And just like that, what had long been a myth—the return I had spent years negotiating with myself, half-resigned to its impossibility—became a banal entry on an airline itinerary. DAM. Three letters, as unassuming as any other destination, tucked among the hundreds of flights I had taken since I first left Syria for graduate school in the U.S. exactly twenty years ago.

Except for one familiar face at check-in, I knew no one on the full flight. Yet it felt as if we had all conspired to depart together, as if years of longing had braided our itineraries into a single thin white line on the screen between Doha and Damascus.

Then, as if on cue:

“ʿĀshat Sūriyā! Saqaṭ Bashār al-Asad!”

A chorus erupted from the middle rows, swelling into song, chants, sobs. Some waved the green-striped flag with three red stars—now the official flag of the country. Others sang at the top of their lungs, as if their voices alone could will the plane forward.

We were no prophets, Doha was no Mecca, Damascus no Jerusalem, and the Airbus 330, though old, was certainly no Buraq. Yet it all felt like a miracle. An Isrāʾ of our own.  In just eleven days that December, the regime had crumbled, collapsing under the weight of its own illusion. Less than a month later, the first flight was scheduled, as if history itself had been holding its breath, waiting for the moment when the sky would open and the path home would reappear.

All doors are thresholds, but for an exile such doors seldom lead home. The door of the plane was an exception that day. I stood at the top of the weathered boarding stairs, looking at the steps carrying the flow of elated bodies as they surged out of the fuselage and down onto the tarmac, as if still in disbelief. The sheer act of touching the ground would confirm that this was all real. Some knelt, pressing their foreheads to the ground in silent gratitude. The cameras of journalists who had been waiting for Flight QR410 captured the tears of joy as they fuse the intimate and the public.

When we landed, Damascus International Airport was no mere terminal; it had just become a threshold between what was lost and what was, less than a month prior, reclaimed. What once was a black hole swallowing students, activists, brothers and mothers who vanished into the silence of brutalist jail cells, now stood as a passage of return. A breaking, through the overlapping clouds of exile—a surrender to gravity of all the first things: the scents, the syllables, the specters that you learned, on every other flight, to tuck away in the carry-on beneath the seat in front of you.

An exile is a comparatist by fate. Every landscape is measured against another, every moment shadowed by what has already been seen elsewhere. To live in exile is to see the world in palimpsests—nothing appears purely in itself, only as an echo of what was lost. As an airport, DAM is neither the open vastness of the Gulf’s terminals nor the glorified airstrips of the Aegean, but something in between—a space where history presses against the present, where architecture holds the sediment of past regimes, past catastrophes, past promises. The sun, low in the January sky, strikes the fuselage of the Airbus 330, the way sunlight in Seville glances off white stone towers on a winter day—soft, diffused, almost otherworldly.

For a moment, I hesitate at the top of the mobile stairs, feeling the weight of arrival. The passengers ahead of me descend swiftly, some pausing, some rushing to the concrete certainty of the tarmac. Return, I remind myself, is not an ascent but a movement downward—toward the source, the well, the first land. The land of first losses, first fears, first escapes.

An exile is a comparatist by fate. You can imagine how much joy that leaves. And yet, for once, I allowed myself a brief and unfamiliar luxury: to believe without irony. Not cautiously, not with one eye on history’s seemingly inevitable tendency to turn hope into farce— but fully this time. For a moment, I indulge in return not a metaphor or metonymy of something bigger, more grand, but as a real simple act of physical descent—down the grooved metal stairs of the aircraft, down the worn stone steps of the village well.

“Al-Shajara,” the tree, the village we come from, the village that is no more. Nothing remains of it but a name and a well. Not every glorification of a village is parochial navel-gazing; some names persist not out of nostalgia but as quiet acts of defiance. Between Nazareth, where the word became flesh, and Tiberias, the navel of the Eastern Mediterranean, Al-Shajara stood. Her sons move through the world like sediment carried by a river, exiled yet abiding, trying to live by geologic time—to bend colonial history as stone bends to wind and water. 

And in its center, the well—the mouth of the earth, the eye of memory. How many hands have gripped its stone rim? How many feet have pressed against its edges, lowering a bucket into the cool depths, drawing up water that carried the taste of time itself?

To return is not to reclaim the past but to stand at its threshold and listen. The well does not speak; it waits. It is the exile who must lower himself, who must reach into the silence and draw forth what lingers there. The steps are worn smooth by the passage of generations, yet untouched for decades. And still, they do not forget.

The exile steps forward—not as the child who was my father, who once darted past the well, his laughter still trapped in the stones, though his body now lies buried on the outskirts of Homs. Nor as the children I glimpsed in the alleyways of what remains of Yarmouk, holding hands as they navigated the wreckage, as if knowing they had only each other left, their small bodies moving across the shattered angles of history, heirs to ruins that were supposed to be their rebirth. Nor as the children in Jabalia, weaving through the skeletal remains of homes, their exile interrupted by the low, mechanical hum of killer drones overhead. Nor as the voice that once rang through village streets or whispered through the corridors of the camp, calling names that now belong to the disappeared.

Twice exiled, twice returned. Yet every return is a return to something that no longer exists, and every exile carries within it the seed of another. To be born in exile is to sever, to leave twice is to become unmoored. Perhaps return is not the antithesis of exile, it is just its latest chapter.