( San Diego Union Tribune ) – Syrian refugees in El Cajon danced in the streets upon hearing about the Dec. 7 collapse of the Assad dynasty, which hailed from the Shi’a Alawite minority and ruled the majority Arab Sunni population of Syria for more than 50 years. Nevertheless, there are also Syrians who stayed home that night, fixated on the news, worried about their families back home, particularly the minority Christian or Shi’a sects.
On Dec. 10, I hastily convened the first public forum in the area on the events in Syria, “The Fall of the House of Assad,” hosted by the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, and the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego, to discuss the dramatic demise in Damascus of Bashar Assad’s presidency. As a Catholic university, on that very stage in 2013, I asked, as a Muslim, for the audience to grant a moment of silence for Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian priest who ran the Deir Mar Musa Monastery, an interfaith Syrian site for both Muslims and Christian. Dall’Oglio mysteriously disappeared in 2013. After more than a decade his fate may finally be known.
The Kroc School had invited me in 2013 to speak about America’s plan to bomb Syrian military sites after Assad’s chemical weapons attack outside of Damascus. I argued then that the U.S. would be dragged into another forever war in the Middle East. In 2024, on that same stage, I told students that American aircrafts were bombing Islamic State of Iraq and Syria sites, indicating that there was no end in sight to this war.
Besides geopolitics, I talked about the last decade of war, of Syrians who came to and from Southern California. They included Syrian Armenian power gangs from the streets of Glendale, who travelled as foreign fighters to the frontlines of Aleppo, filming themselves on social media in front of a destroyed home, fighting for the Assad regime to retake the rebel-held city.
In the other direction, after Yusra Mardini’s family home in Syria was destroyed, they fled as refugees, saving a drowning dinghy and all its passengers in the waters of the Aegean. It turned out she came from a family of Olympic swimmers. She enrolled at USC to study visual arts, the same subject I teach at UC San Diego, where, alas, she could have studied with me about herself in my “Art and the Middle East” course, as I show the harrowing and inspiring Netflix movie about her life, “The Swimmers.”
Nonetheless, I did have a student, Mohammad, who had also witnessed his house being destroyed back in Syria. He was 7 years-old. In February 2017, as a professor, I sat on a kindergarten floor at a grade school in City Heights next to him, part of an increasing number of adults volunteering to help refugees adapt to school in the U.S., resisting Trump’s “Muslim ban” that year.
“Joy in Damascus,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024
The staff told me not to speak to him in Arabic, so that he could learn English, but I ignored them. Together, we built a house from toy bricks, whereupon he said, “Let’s destroy it like my house in Syria.” I replied, “Nothing will happen to your new house.” During the cleanup, I asked the volunteer staff if we could leave his house standing until we left the classroom. I took the boy to his father, waiting at the entrance, who informed me that Mohammad would be meeting his new brother, born just an hour ago, a life made possible because the U.S. had let in a refugee family.
In 2013, the Syrians in the audience seemed despondent. This month, I recounted Mohammed’s story to a USD audience and two female students approached me, optimistic about the country’s future, as Mohammed must be, who should be 13 or 14 now.
Syria is at a critical juncture, as it forms a transitional government, either bringing stability or following the fate of Libya and Yemen, overthrowing a dictator only to witness the victorious rebels fight amongst themselves, not only preventing refugees from returning, but creating more of them. Mohammed’s story is also intended for America promising “mass deportations.”
As one tragedy hopefully comes to an end, President-elect Donald Trump should not follow the legacy of President Bashar Assad of further causing the dispersion of the desperate.
Reprinted with the author’s permission from the San Diego Union Tribune
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