The Road to (and from) Damascus - by Sophie Fuji - Sophisms
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The Road to (and from) Damascus<br>Notes from a week in Syria
Sophie Fuji<br>May 25, 2026
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Syria is perhaps the poorest place I have ever been, by the numbers at least. It maintains its dignity in a way that obscures its poverty: 90% of the population is below the poverty line ($3.65/day), 66% in absolute poverty ($2.15/day), GDP is down 80% since 2011, half the population displaced during the war. Syria might sound unliveable by the statistics, but people have endured far worse so it feels liveable to them. A man told me life was good now because he used to go to the grocery store and worry that his family would be dead by the time he returned. A woman is excited to have students again, even though she often tutors for free since the person will go hungry if they pay her. A family says their children are finally getting better education (they send them to private school for $100/year) although they cannot afford to eat meat and borrow to make rent each month. Their measurement of a good life is incomprehensible to outsiders, but it is hard not to be moved by how strong of a front they put up.<br>Most comparably poor countries have always been poor, whereas Syria regressed from being an industrialised country. Syrians do not seem to assign blame, there are too many candidates: fifty-four years of the Assads, the Arab Spring, interference from Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, and the West in the war, ISIS and a constellation of other jihadi groups, then a 2023 earthquake in the north. In December 2024, the regime fell and Assad fled to Moscow, and the West decided Syria was finally a friend. Since then, the US has began to lift sanctions, removed the terrorist designation from its new government (a former al-Qaeda affiliate) and Syria begins the long path of rebuilding.
A Damascene house / Maaloula, one of the last Aramaic-speaking villages / Krak des Chevaliers
We arrive at the Jordanian-Syrian border, staring at the options: Women Arrivals, Arab Arrivals, Foreign Arrivals, Syrian Arrivals, Jordanian Arrivals. We tentatively choose the women’s line and find ourselves behind a row of men, one of whom escorts us to Jordanian Arrivals, behind a Congolese man. We have pre-applied for visas on US passports, but having entered Jordan on Hong Kong passports, they demand to see our exit stamps. Holding both, the guard looks up. “You are Chinese?” I nod. He hands back the US passports as I try to explain our Syrian visas are registered to those. “But you are Chinese?”<br>He takes the Hong Kong passports away and returns with a slip: $25. The cashier stares at the passports, “You are not Chinese, you are Hong Kong!” We say Hong Kong is Chinese, and they argue with us in broken English, saying Hong Kong visas are $150, still less than the $250 I’ve been told for US passports, so I nod. Animatedly, he points at me, “150 US dollars! US dollars! Are you sure? Are you sure this is ok? 150 each!” They take the passports away and spend a long time arguing in the back room, one of them intermittently sucking on the cover of my passport. When they return, I present three $100 bills. One laughs, “Mistake, mistake, too much. $25 ok!” We give them $50 and they laugh as we walk away.<br>Our driver assured us this kind of chaos was only temporary, the new government is improving things like this.
Many Syrians are less optimistic about the new government. A Christian woman I met lamented that they had at least held elections in the Assad era, nobody had voted for this president. She says that sectarianism had never existed until this new regime adopted the western talking points. She worried that Christians were becoming repressed, Easter celebrations now had to be held in private and her Muslim friends no longer joined in, as they always had. She resented the new regime’s attention to what she considered frivolous matters: restricting alcohol, cracking down on pornography, introducing speed cameras, getting rid of anti-Israel signs. “Now we understand nothing,” she said. “We are less hopeful for change than before.” Eighteen months into the transition she felt there was no progress to be seen. “People are getting poorer and poorer than before.” Public sector wages suggest otherwise, having risen 10-35x. She felt that Syria was being passed around, “The bus was being driven by Iran and Russia, now it’s being driven by Turkey and America.”<br>A man across town offered a different account. His current wife is Sunni Muslim, his ex-wife Christian, his neighbours Alawite and Shia. He insisted that Syrians continue to be the most inclusive, and even his Jewish friends have returned under the new regime. He mentioned his cousin, a polygamous Muslim married to both a Christian and a Muslim woman which is acceptable because from each woman’s perspective, she is in a monogamous marriage. He insisted only Alawites, Assad’s minority sect, had ever been...