Dima Wannous’s ‘Damascus: A Tomb and a Prison’

This essay, by award-winning author Dima Wannous, appears in our latest issue, SYRIA: Fall of Eternity, ed. Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam. If you’re in Berlin, join us for a launch event on May 3, 2026.

Damascus: A Tomb and a Prison

By Dima Wannous

Translated by Alaa Alqaisi

Early 2025

 

I arrived in Beirut on Friday, January 3, 2025, at exactly 7:30 p.m. It’s important to document this down to the minute, because time stopped in my mind the moment Bashar al-Assad fled—on the night of Saturday, December 7, 2024. Literally, my sense of time froze, and my capacity to comprehend began to fade. The journey was surreal from the moment I opened the door of “my home” in London and said goodbye to my mother and my son. It was the first time in thirteen years that I had left them behind to move from my home to my home. A week later, I would begin to miss my home in London—and the sensation would catch me off guard. I would find myself lost amid the many places I’ve drifted through over the years, wandering in a futile search for that first place—the one that once held the promise of safety, stability, and peace of mind.

The journey remained surreal: leaving my family and “home” in London to meet my family and home in Damascus, passing through Beirut, which had also been “home” for six years between 2011 and 2017. The moment I reached Heathrow Airport, my energy began to wane. I felt exhausted, my head brimming with emotions and tangled thoughts. My watch told me my heart was racing faster than usual. I hesitated to board the plane that would carry me from “my home” in London to my home in Damascus, by way of “my home” in Beirut. What deepened that feeling of fatigue and disorientation—as though I were trapped in a dream—was the fact that Beirut’s Rafic Hariri Airport, which had terrified me for years due to Hezbollah’s control, was now “liberated” and under the authority of the Lebanese army. And what irony that the airport, named after the late Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, had once been under the grip of Hezbollah—the very group that murdered him on behalf of the Syrian regime, and that had subjected travelers like me to years of calculated humiliations, relentless questions, and drawn-out interrogations. On the plane, I tried to reassure myself: everything is fine now. There’s nothing to fear—neither in Lebanon nor at the Lebanese-Syrian border. But fear that has accumulated over decades isn’t easily exorcised overnight. Especially not on the night of Saturday, December 7, 2024, when Assad fled, nor on the night of September 27, when Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated.  I kept turning over a violent paradox in my mind: our existence seems tied to death and escape. Nasrallah died, and the Lebanese breathed again, as if reborn. Assad fled, and the Syrians too began to breathe and be reborn. And here I am, returning today to my first place—thanks to that death, and that escape.

For the first time in thirteen years, I passed through Rafic Hariri Airport en route to Damascus. Nothing compared to the force of that yes I uttered when the border officer asked me:

“What are you doing here? Heading to Syria?”

I spent the night at the home of some Lebanese friends. Together, we celebrated the fall of our “eternals”—Lebanon’s and Syria’s. We celebrated death and escape. What misery. And yet, despite our collective astonishment, the night felt enchanted—more like a figment of imagination than anything real. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t drift into slumber. I closed my eyes to visions of my city, now within reach. I imagined myself walking down my street, in front of my home and the homes of my friends, threading through alleyways, slipping into cafés that shaped my adolescence and early adulthood. How could I sleep?

At six in the morning, I surrendered to insomnia and rose from the bed in Hazem and Diana’s apartment—the bed I had grown used to during my six years in Beirut. But today was different. Everything was different. I was different. At the very least, I was now more than ten years older. I drank coffee with Diana and Hazem. The light was dim in the spacious living room, and the morning had yet to break. Diana repeated what she’d said the night before—that the suitcase I was dragging behind me was too big for a temporary visit, that it looked as though I were coming back for good, not just passing through. I didn’t tell her the suitcase was full of my mother’s belongings—sweaters, coats, trousers—things she was sending to her niece and her niece’s daughters. For the past thirteen years, we had helped my mother gather the scattered pieces of her despair, her depression, her longing for home, her grief over separation. And now, she could not return because of her refugee documents. So, she sent me the things that belonged to her. And many gifts. An attempt to connect with that distant past with her worn-out memory, with the scent of places and loved ones.

By seven in the morning, I dragged my sleepless body out the door and said goodbye to my friends. I got into the Lebanese car that would take me to the border, where I was to meet Salem—the Syrian driver I had spent countless hours with, years ago, traveling the road between Damascus and Beirut. The car snaked its way up through hills and mountains, then down again—that road etched into my memory looked different this morning. Brighter, yet tinged with sorrow. I tried to explain its sorrow. My sorrow. It was nothing but fear, layered in quiet folds. And all those years I had lived outside that first place, in peace—beyond the reach of brutality—were not enough to keep that fear asleep. Then, as we crossed the Lebanese border and neared the Syrian one, the fear dissolved. The usual emotions faded. From afar, I spotted Salem waving at me with a smile. He had aged ten years. His hairline had receded, his beard was streaked with gray. I hugged him as if I were embracing all the years that had passed without me, beyond me, behind my back. I got into his car, and we were awkward with emotion. Where to begin? What to ask? What to say? Salem broke the silence by telling me about his only sister—how she lost her mind at the age of fifty-five. Her only son had been detained at a checkpoint in the Damascus countryside in mid-2013, and to this day, his whereabouts remain unknown. He said she lost her mind gradually, day by day, year after year. He said she is now at the gates of Saydnaya prison—sleeping there, waking there—waiting to catch a glimpse of her son walking out. They searched for him everywhere, even for his corpse, or any news of his death, just to calm her torment. But in vain. “Only the grave,” he said, “might restore her sanity.”

He also told me about his brother, who was abducted at the Air Force Intelligence checkpoint in Madaya in early 2012. When they paid the ransom, the regime returned him—a lifeless body. “At least we buried my brother,” he said. “We can visit his grave.” I was speechless. Our journey had to begin with this—with loss—so that life could fall back into place. So we could reclaim the conversations we’d missed over the past decade.

We reached the rusting sign at the edge of the road—its blue paint faded, its frame bent backward by the wind. The sign I had dreamed of for so long: “Syria Welcomes You.”

At that sign, the tears came. I gasped for air. A flood of joy, fear, triumph, gratitude, confusion—a surge of disbelief. The exhaustion of all those years collapsed in one great wave. I noticed my body trembling as I walked from the car toward the old building—the place where our identities are trapped inside computer systems, where our fates hang in the balance, tied to the number of security reports filed against us, and the number of intelligence branches eager to arrest or question us the moment we set foot in our own country. Everything was surreal.

I stepped into the building beside Salem, my body shaking from the flood of emotion. The border officers were smiling—not as usual. The young officer who greeted me couldn’t have been more than thirty. He welcomed me back to my country and muttered: “Welcome home.” Then he typed my name into the same old computer and started laughing. He asked what I did for a living. Then he said, “If only you knew how many intelligence branches have wanted to question you!” He began listing them—those that had summoned me for interrogation, those that had marked me for arrest. I fought back the fear. All of that’s in the past now. Don’t be afraid. I kept repeating this to myself.

My city emerged on the horizon, just beyond the last hill on the road between Beirut and Damascus. Time felt heavy, and Damascus’s features had grown old. The car moved along the Mazzeh highway—past my house—toward the Umayyad Square, where the Sheraton Hotel stood. I peered at the cafés where I used to write every morning. Either they had disappeared or their names had changed. Time, suspended. Not a single nail had been hammered in since I left. I said goodbye to Salem and stepped into the lobby of the Sheraton, where I would be staying during this visit. I had barely walked three steps when the outlines of friends began to surface—here, there. Greetings, embraces, tears and laughter and shouting. It all overwhelmed me with even more confusion. It was as if I had arrived in a foreign city, come to attend a conference on Syria and meet Syrian friends I’d only come to know in the thirteen years since I left. I was disoriented. All these friends—former colleagues from the TV station where I once worked, the newspaper I once wrote for—we were now gathered, for the first time, in the country we had all worked for, from afar, for so long. Friends arriving from France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. Friends whose Syrian phone numbers I’d long lost. Now every contact bore a range of numbers: French, Dutch, Egyptian… one for WhatsApp, one for calls, a third for travel. And I was afraid. I felt I didn’t exist. That everything I was living was a dream and an illusion. What added to my unease was that most of the hotel staff were the same—only time had carved their features, grayed their hair, sagged their faces and dulled their eyes. These employees, who had once played intelligence roles in “Assad’s Syria,” listening in on conversations, writing security reports on guests and visitors—how would they adjust to their new roles in a “Free Syria”?

I went up to my room in the five-star hotel, which had once been legendary. A wave of nausea hit me. The room was unspeakably old. The air reeked of cigarettes. The wooden desk was corroded. The corners of the bathroom were layered with mold and rot. Even the shower curtain hadn’t been changed in decades. The towels smelled like a mix of smoke and dust. Every detail, every odor suggested not a hotel, but the cell of an intelligence branch. I was collapsing from exhaustion and emotional overflow. But I didn’t sleep.

I went out into the streets, wanting to devour them. Instead, they devoured me. I vanished. I lost the ability to connect with the outside world. I could barely call my mother or my son—and when I did, it was mostly silence that hung over the line. The city had struck me mute. There was no space for language, no strength for interpretation. I couldn’t describe the torrent of scenes I was experiencing. I returned to my room at 2 a.m., still floating on a cloud of dream and delirium, incapable of absorbing anything. I walked past my room without realizing it, searching for 544 with no luck, until I heard a thin, weathered voice behind me: “Madam, this is your room.” I startled. I turned. It was a man in his sixties—the same man who had worked at this hotel just a month ago, before the regime fell. He pointed me toward my room, smiling. And I was terrified. He hadn’t forgotten his former role: memorizing room numbers and guests’ identities. I couldn’t sleep. Every rustle of feet outside my door sent waves of fear into my chest.

Then, I fell ill. I dragged my body between the miserable room and the hotel lobby, sitting with friends who were sick, too. I thought: everyone who came from abroad is falling ill. Fever, fatigue, shortness of breath, aching joints and muscles, coughing, congestion, vomiting…I was saddened to be sick at the wrong moment. I rarely catch colds—and now, after thirteen years of waiting, I fall ill in Damascus? I imagined Bashar al-Assad issuing an order to release a deadly virus before fleeing to Moscow, one last act to finish off what remained of Syrians, to kill the returning dreamers, the ones who had waited a decade to come back. Then I laughed at the absurdity: millions of forcibly displaced Syrians, settled in Europe, now returning as tourists! Their lungs can no longer bear the black smog rising from cigarettes, hookahs, car exhaust, generators. Their guts can no longer handle food that may be spoiled by power cuts and poor refrigeration. The truth is this: Our spirits were enduring something unspeakably violent, beyond our capacity. And when the spirit tires, it casts its burden onto the body and hides in its organs. That’s why we all fell ill—our illness was the body’s way of expressing that overwhelming, dreamlike moment.

In those first few days, I noticed my few friends in Damascus—those who had remained through all the years—were treating me like a tourist. They took me to places tourists like Old Damascus and its upscale restaurants; the Umayyad Square, with its still-standing TV and radio building and the Damascus Sword monument; Mount Qasioun overlooking a hazy, dust-covered city; bars in the wealthy neighborhoods of al-Maliki and Abu Rummaneh; the Umayyad Mosque; the Medhat Basha market. And while these tourist spots are among my favorites in Damascus, the kind of “tourism” I longed for was different. I ignored the illness and took a taxi. I asked the driver to take me to Jobar, in the Damascus countryside—once home to the world’s oldest synagogue, once a place where the first anti-regime protests rose up in 2011. Jobar—obliterated by the regime’s barrel bombs. Flattened, erased, as if it had never existed.

That morning drive beneath Damascus’s blue sky, under a blinding sun that offered no warmth, worsened my symptoms. I could no longer distinguish between the dizziness of illness and the dizziness of awe, misery, helplessness, guilt. To feel like the only living thing in this vast and ruined place. I walked cautiously through the alleys, careful not to approach the edges of the road—the regime had left landmines behind to finish off whatever souls remained. The air was full of ruin, dust, silence. A dreadful quiet. The network was weak—it felt like another planet. Nothing but silence, rubble, and the ghosts of those who had fled their homes. Or died. Then on the wall of a destroyed house, I saw the words: “Assad’s Syria… Republican Guard… Battalion 1399.”

The horror: that such criminal, barbaric destruction could become an “art form,” such that the perpetrator feels compelled to sign his “work.” How will we survive such ruin? How can we avoid a civil war after all these crimes? Then we visited Harasta, where my uncle’s house was destroyed in early 2012. All the homes were destroyed. Then Douma. Daraya. Ruin surrounding Damascus, encircling it, choking it, sealing off its air.

We passed a vast area near my house in Mazzeh, its surface covered with unfinished cement buildings. The driver told me it was a residential and commercial development owned by Asma al-Assad. The next day, one torture survivor told me the purpose of the project was to hide corpses: mass graves buried beneath those buildings, or bodies burned out of sight. If we were to gather the whole of Damascus’s countryside—that ruined stretch once called the “poverty belts”—and combine it with these ghost projects designed to conceal victims, along with the basement prisons of the capital’s many intelligence branches, we would see it: Damascus has become a vast mass grave. There’s a crushing weight in returning to a land you longed for after thirteen years of absence, only to find it a giant tomb. To walk hesitantly across its surface, not knowing whether any patch of ground is a torture chamber or a grave.

Dima Wannous was born in 1982. She is a writer and translator who studied French literature at Damascus University and the Sorbonne. She is the author of a short story collection, Details (2007), and two novels, The Chair (2008) and The Frightened Ones (2017), which was shortlisted for the Arabic International Prize for Literature.

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.