“Now we have the first flower of freedom, but it’s just the beginning.”
Damascus
I spent some time in the capital pricing ordinary things—milk, meat, fruit, cigarettes—to try to understand how ordinary people survived and fed their families. Many in the international community had seen the sanctions against Syria as leverage to get the new government to do what it wants; Syria had been one of the most comprehensively sanctioned nations in the world. That may finally change. In May, at the urging of the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, President Donald Trump met with the country’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, a former jihadist who had led al-Qaida’s faction in Syria. Within days, the US as well as nations in the Arab League and the EU vowed to lift sanctions.
But as I walked the streets, it was all too evident that the economy was a complete wreck. It had contracted 85 percent during the war, which had sparked hyperinflation. Now only 10 percent of Syrians live above the poverty line.
Here and there in the city I saw people carrying stacks of currency in plastic bags to buy groceries or even go out for a simple coffee. The notes are worth virtually nothing. At ATMs people lined up for hours, toting books to read while they waited.
I found many people disgruntled, bordering on furious. “This note used to be worth about $10 when I was a student,” said Raji, a Syrian Lebanese friend who accompanied me on the trip. “Now it’s worth 10 cents.” People are skilled at counting vast piles of money quickly. “It’s how we live,” my friend Rauda shrugged as she fanned through a stack of bills to pay for a streetside sandwich.
One springlike morning, I visited the monastery of Saint Takla in the ancient village of Maaloula, a longtime Christian bulwark. I was startled at how impoverished people had become since my last visit. In Maaloula, Sister Maria—whom I hadn’t seen since 2012 and who had been kidnapped at one point by extremist groups—spoke without hesitation or restraint. Her concerns were less with the past, including her own personal trauma, than with the future. “Our biggest problem right now in Syria is money,” she stressed. “Without money, you can’t buy food. We are running out of everything.” Elsewhere, as in Ghouta province to the southwest, I had seen people begging in the streets as well as children scrounging for food.
And yet in Damascus, despite all the deprivations, on a Thursday night—the first night of the weekend—the popular steak restaurant at the Hotel Chams Palace was packed with young Damascenes wearing Veja designer sneakers and Supreme hoodies. These were not Western visitors, but local 20- and 30-somethings drinking Lebanese wine and eating Wagyu steak flamed with a blowtorch. Somewhere, somehow, someone is making money from misery.
In the most curious sign of all, I visited a friend’s beauty salon on a Thursday afternoon to see how women were preparing for the weekend. The salon was in an affluent section of Damascus, and young women flocked there not just for blowouts and manicures but for Botox. A doctor in designer jeans wielding a syringe went from chair to chair, injecting young Syrian girls in their foreheads and cheeks.
Regardless of the pricey meals and cosmetic toxins, I felt a slight undercurrent of menace that, in its way, was a throwback to the Assad days because of the skyrocketing costs of everyday staples, and because when the prisons were emptied, criminals had been released along with political prisoners. We were advised, for instance, not to drive at night on the highway from Hama to Damascus.
There were existential threats as well. During my visit, Israel, Syria’s nemesis to the south, launched its first major air strikes after a long lull, killing two soldiers. The Israeli Defense Forces crept further into Syrian territory, moving additional troops into the buffer zone between Syria and the Golan Heights and taking control of areas beyond that perimeter, including Mount Hermon.
My hotel was in the beautiful Old City of Damascus. It is believed to be civilization’s longest continually inhabited city, dating to at least 8000 BC, and you feel the weight of history when you walk through the ancient streets, through the Christian quarter near Bab Touma, through the quarter where they sell dusty rugs and copper coffee pots; and my favorite street, where you can buy glass oil lamps and used vinyl singles—45s—from the 1960s. Late one night from my room, I could hear distant bombing, which reminded me of the war days when I would rush to my balcony to see plumes of black smoke rising over the outskirts of town. The next morning at breakfast, the waiter served me pita, olives, hummus, and coffee and told me that Israeli forces had bombed a military installation not far from the center of the city. Their supposed target: leftover weapons stockpiles.
A Syrian friend angrily railed. Israel, he said, was trying to force a confrontation with the HTS administration, which did not have the capacity to resist—part of an attempt, he theorized, to destabilize the fledgling government. Certainly, the presence of Israel was ubiquitous. The entire time I was in Syria, I received creepy text messages in Hebrew and English welcoming me to “Israeli air space.” Some of my Lebanese colleagues—well-versed in Israeli tactics from the deadly 2024 cellular attacks on Hezbollah’s leadership—told me they got such alerts all the time, describing them as “psyops” intended to intimidate cell phone users.
