Missing Images

The images coming out of Damascus on December 8, 2024, were astounding. After an eleven-day offensive in which city after city fell from regime control, Syrian opposition factions finally arrived in the capital. By 5 a.m., they reached the city’s iconic Umayyad Square, entered the state-run television station and announced to the country the fall of the Assad regime. For the first time in 54 years, Syria was free from the Assads’ rule. And for the first time in 54 years, Damascenes poured into the streets, celebrating the end of what seemed—until just a few hours prior—to be an eternity of tyranny.

Coincidentally, I spent that day with my mother and sisters at my eldest sister’s house in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. We had planned to have a home-cooked Syrian meal—shakria, fatayer and fattoush—and watch Love Is Blind: Habibi (as well as Lindsey Lohan’s new Christmas film). Though we did all of that, our eyes were also glued to our phones, seeing images we thought we’d never live to see: prisoners being freed from the regime’s torture factories; Assad’s statues toppled in the streets of every major city; the revolutionary flag flown in central Damascus.

Among the images that transfixed me most were those of ordinary citizens touring and looting Assad’s palaces in the city, both his private residence in Malki—the A-list and most regime-infested neighborhood in the capital—as well as the People’s Palace (Qasr al-Shaab). Unlike Assad’s private residence, the People’s Palace is not hidden among checkpointed and forested lanes, but sits atop Mount Mezzeh, visible to all Damascus. Designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, the palace is an imposing and modern structure, its compounds occupying the entire summit, and its glass façade reflecting the rising sun as well as the Assad family’s domination of a city from which they did not hail but had nevertheless subjugated. Like the Assad family’s power, the People’s Palace was in plain sight and for all to see—a gloating reminder to Syrians and Damascenes of their domination. This is why those scenes on December 8th were so significant: ordinary Syrians were discovering and claiming the insides of a palace that had allegedly belonged to them. I would have killed to be there, maybe to grab a mother-of-pearl-inlaid writing desk, or perhaps one of the ex-first lady’s Chanel dresses.

FOMO aside, these images brought me back to a particular incident in the summer of 2007. Though I was born in Chicago, I lived mostly in Damascus until the age of five, when we returned to the States. From that point until the outbreak of the war in Syria, my family would spend the summers in Damascus, a time that I would wait for ten months out of the year. Always suspecting that my time in the city was fleeting, I fashioned myself into an amateur photographer and flaneur. A few afternoons a week, I’d venture out into the city’s sunbaked streets and snap photos. The streets felt lethargic and largely empty (“It’s too hot for people to work, so they go home to nap,” my mother explained). I, for one, enjoyed it: it felt transgressive to be out when most were asleep. And less people also meant that I would be less bothered. Sometimes, I would walk up Thawra Street for ten minutes to reach the walls of the Old City and spend the hours meandering down maze-like alleys, taking pictures of old courtyards with fountains and orange trees, basking in the scent of jasmine that hung over the place like a spell. Other times, I’d walk up the slopes of Mount Qasioun—supposedly the place where Cain had killed Abel—and explore the modern city, photographing grandiose squares, palm-tree-lined avenues and brutalist buildings.

But what my photographer heart really wanted was to get a photo of the People’s Palace, which I knew would be dangerous: pointing my camera in the direction of Mount Mezzeh might elicit attention that, in turn, might mean the difference between freedom and disappearance. I knew this in part because of my mother’s yearly lectures about “not talking politics” to anyone in Syria. It was a truth universally acknowledged that “the walls have ears” and that anyone could be an informant. Especially taxi drivers. “Even family?” I asked once. Perhaps not family, she replied, but better to stay on the safe side and not speak at all.

Despite my mother’s warnings, I couldn’t resist the rare opportunity afforded by a ride in my uncle’s car. We were on the Road to Beirut, a highway that snaked along the side of Mount Qasioun and offered a clear view across the mountain pass and toward the palace. There it was, sprawled out like a lion, at once sinister and seductive. Without anyone noticing, I stealthily retrieved my camera and stole three photos of the palace’s profile. Over the next week, I forgot this incident and took more photos, mostly of family affairs. When the film was complete, I went to get it developed at a Kodak shop in Abu Rummaneh. Walking home, the memory of my transgression returned. The excitement I had felt inverted to terror. Over two suspenseful days, the sense of uncertainty and doom nearly suffocated me. Would the photos pass unnoticed? Would I be on the regime’s radar? Am I being watched? How would I know?

Two days later, I returned to the Kodak shop having accepted my fate. Smiling, the handsome lab technician handed me an envelope of my developed photos and sent me off. On the walk home, I felt like a man condemned to something worse than death. Upon arrival, I ran to the bedroom, shut the door, and with trembling hands, flipped through the images: Umayyad Square, Aunt Zahra at the Zabadani house, our vacation in Lattakia… By the time I got to the end, a cold sweat covered my skin and my stomach felt coated in lead.

The palace pictures had disappeared. No negatives. No trace. I was done. But when?

For the next month, I was convinced that I would be “taken” at the airport, on our return back to Chicago. I told no one, not even my mother. I blamed myself and knew in my heart that no one could help me. Having made it safely past the thuggish guards at the Damascus Airport, I carried my terror back to Chicago, where the paranoia took on new dimensions: a new fear of police officers and security guards, a feeling of being watched, the sense that I could be taken from the safety and familiarity of my family and my world. With each passing summer in Damascus, the terror lessened. But to this day, I haven’t fully outgrown the sense that the world could be lost over what I’d seen, said or captured.

Was this fear a figment of a twelve-year-old’s imagination? Certainly, paranoia is a form of trauma, a family’s inheritance in Assad’s Syria. But is paranoia the right word when the terror fumbles so near something real? This is where the singularity of the Assad regime lay: it was a regime that produced—with grotesque originality—experiences of terror that were unthinkable in their depravity. In the last week, the images that emerged from Sednaya Prison—the Assad Regime’s torture palace—attest to that unimaginable reality: devices that pressed live humans into pulp; machines that vaporized bodies into nothingness; walls painted with the blood of prisoners; minuscule cells buried under layers of cement; emaciated bodies; shadow-beings who had not seen the sun in decades, their sense of time, space and identity shattered beyond repair. These horrors were what my father and his family had escaped in the 1980s, when his eldest brothers got involved in an uprising-turned-massacre by the regime. The entire family was forced to flee. But the images of Sednaya allowed Syrians to grasp something we all “knew” but couldn’t fully imagine. Beneath our cities, our streets, our afternoon siestas was a reality of unrelenting cruelty and unspeakable violence—a reality produced by the Assad regime and in which none of us could avoid being cast.

But on December 8th, scrolling on our phones in the suburbs of Chicago, another kind of unimaginable image stood out to me as well, one that won’t disappear regardless of what comes next: the euphoria of freedom. I saw it on the faces of the Syrians on the screens, and I saw it on our own faces—mine, my mother’s and my sisters’—who had long buried the dream of ever returning to the country we had called our home.

Photo credit: Ahmed Akacha