Hama, Syria 1982
In February 1982, when Hafez al-Assad—in a final bid to decimate the opposition—killed and disappeared tens of thousands of people in Hama, almost no one inside or outside Syria knew exactly how many were dead. It was the culmination of over a decade-long struggle by Assad to cement his rule, years in which people were arrested, tortured, summarily executed or forever disappeared into the regime’s dungeons. Even speaking to another of what had happened, what was happening, could incur a Syrian any of these violences.
Hama, a city on the banks of the Orontes River, had become the center of the opposition, which was an array of interests that had coalesced around the most organized of the groups, the Muslim Brotherhood. This included communists and Christians, even though the Brotherhood was Islamist, pro-capitalist and anti-statist. Before Assad launched an all-out assault on the city, violent confrontations with his opponents had reached a fever pitch, and the end of Assad’s rule seemed inevitable, even natural. At the very least, it would have been fantastical to suggest the regime would endure till the last days of 2024.
This longevity, Syrians believed, had to be proof that the outside world did not know what had happened in Hama, and therefore had not grasped the true and brutal nature of the regime. If only they had seen, they would have been moved to act. But in 1982, the regime was able to impose a complete media blackout. That things could have been different would remain an untested hypothesis.
The regime was also able to suppress any conversation about what had happened, and so inside Syria, it was as if it never had. A pervasive security and intelligence apparatus, employing a network of ruthless thugs, surveilled the population and eavesdropped on their conversations. Transgressions against silence were quickly met with violence, which effectively enforced this official amnesia. Those whose exact fates after Hama were unknown became either corpses or worse. Everyone else in Syria was transformed too—at the very least into bystanders of this evil.
Amman, Jordan 1982
For thirteen-year-old Rana Dajani, the arrival at her home in Amman of sisters Umayma and Sumaya from Hama, just weeks after the massacres, was her first intimate exposure to acute trauma, one that would shape the course of her professional life. The daughter of a Palestinian father forcibly displaced from his home in West Jerusalem with the founding of the state of Israel, violence and loss were hardly an abstraction to Rana. She had also listened with her parents to the nightly radio broadcasts from a Baghdad-based opposition station about what was happening in Hama, where her Syrian mother was originally from. Yet when the sisters (her mother’s cousins) came to their house and were soon joined by many other women who had fled Syria with their children but not their men—who had been tortured, killed or disappeared—Rana was suddenly immersed in both their pain and their survival.
Her family was four years back from Iowa, where her father had specialized as an allergist-immunologist and become a successful physician. But in Iowa, her mother, whose faith in Islam had deepened, felt strongly that their skills belonged in the Arab world; they’d settled in Amman because Rana’s father had Jordanian citizenship. Their home was her mother’s domain, and she managed it in the mold of the strict Franciscan nuns who ran the school she had attended as a girl in Syria. When the women began fleeing Hama, Rana’s mother took many of them in as they rebuilt their lives.
Already at home, Rana had her rituals. She studied the Qur’an with her mother, working diligently to learn it by heart to recite from memory back to her. Her father, whose eyesight was ailing, would have Rana read to him every night from Scientific American and National Geographic. Once the women came, Rana spent hours with them after school and on weekends. She was there when they wept and there when they sang songs of prayer to God for relief. “In hardship and ease, I seek refuge in Your protection throughout my life,” they’d sing. “Help me, O my support, and bestow upon me dew from Your hands.”
Hama, Syria 1992
Ten years after the massacres in Hama, in 1992, I visited the city—where my grandmother’s family is from—for the first time. My parents were both born in Damascus, and until 1980, I had spent my summers there. But in June 1980, Islamists had attempted to assassinate Hafez al-Assad. His brother extracted swift and brutal revenge by massacring over one thousand inmates at the infamous prison in Tadmour (Palmyra). The day after, regime men took my grandmother’s brother, and two days later his bullet-riddled corpse was found dumped in a ditch by the side of the road. His family was told not to seek justice or they’d share his fate. His murder helped convince my parents to stay in the U.S., even as they had been planning our family’s return as soon as my father finished his training. Eventually, my parents became Americans, even if begrudgingly.
In Hama, I stayed at the apartment building that my long-deceased great-grandfather had built. He and my great-grandmother had lived on the ground floor with its garden, while each of the five floors above belonged to one of his sons, including the murdered one. I’d come for a family wedding, and the apartment building was right behind the church where the ceremony was to take place. The church itself had been destroyed in the 1982 assault, but the Christian community had quickly repaired it. With this swift restoration they’d done what was expected of Syrians: partake in the erasure of evidence and memory of what had happened in Hama.
Back in 1982, the family building had stood higher than others in the city. As I looked up at it in the sun, a relative, who was Lebanese and had the audacity of an outsider, whispered in my ear that when Assad decimated Hama, the regime’s snipers had commandeered “our” rooftop. I felt a sickening sense of guilt, even as I knew that I—like most Syrians—was not at fault.
Then a teenager, I had only a vague understanding of the specifics but a clear sense of the menace. Violence may have been as invisible as it was ever present, but I knew enough to know that in just this exchange of words, my relative and I had transgressed. We were not only to act as if the massacre hadn’t happened but also as if we never knew it had happened. Had the bystanders in the intervening years become accomplices?
Damascus, Syria 2011
Until 2011, the legacy of Hama endured; Syrians’ lives were clearly circumscribed and controlled, and Syrians who wanted to stay in the country acquiesced to the regime’s rule and rules. Multiple generations of Syrians were living in a perpetual present, with a past that only went as far back as the last coup, which brought the Assad regime to power in 1970. In 2000, after Hafez al-Assad died, his son Bashar al-Assad had inherited the presidency.
The Arab Spring broke that stagnation. Peaceful demonstrators across Syria’s many ethnic and religious lines asked for reforms, euphoric that the future seemed to have finally arrived, just as it appeared to have done in Tunisia and Egypt. Instead, the regime met the protesters with violence, claiming they were defending the country from foreign-funded jihadists. Eventually, inevitably, some Syrians answered the government’s violence with violence of their own. I was living in Damascus by then.
In February 2012, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Hama massacre and nearly a year into the people’s uprising against Assad the younger, the regime launched its bloodiest assault yet—this time on Homs, Hama’s historical rival city. It would last all February. Though the month, with its condensed and dark days, was the shortest of the year, it seemed endless.
While we’d never know if the regime’s timing was coincidental or intentional, we’d finally be able to answer what Syrians had wondered for thirty years: What would have happened if the world could have seen what the regime had done to its own people in Hama? Unlike in 1982, because of social media and smartphones, photographic and video evidence could now be readily captured, disseminated and seen—by anyone who wanted to see.
In the end, the regime employed many means to kill: conventional and chemical weapons, bombardment, siege and starvation. It even used torture as a means of execution. While there was an unarmed opposition, they were quickly sidelined. Soon, unholy holy warriors joined in, each faction competing in a one-upmanship in barbarity. External nations picked (and armed) their sides, and Western nations refereed by bombing swaths of the country. Some half a million Syrians lost their lives, at the hands of the regime but also those of its opponents. Others lost their homes, their futures, their families, their minds and their faith in a world that just had to see in order to act.
Amman, Jordan 2015
Though Syrians had begun to flee their country’s violence almost immediately, most of the world didn’t take notice until 2015, when the country’s unraveling saw half a million Syrians take to the sea they had always shared with Europe. Syrians were met with some empathy in the European Union, but also much hand-wringing as well as downright antipathy. For the EU, what to do with the sudden influx of refugees via the Mediterranean became a major political fault line and, to some degree, began to break the Union apart. The vast majority of Syrian refugees, however, ended up in neighboring countries—Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan—where they’d been arriving since 2011.
Rana Dajani, now 46 and a molecular biologist, also felt that she was—for the first time—a Syrian. She’d always claimed her Palestinian and Jordanian identities—even her Iowan one, after a Fulbright brought her back to (of all places) the University of Iowa. But only once the Syrian uprising started, and more than 1.3 million Syrians arrived in Jordan, did she begin to fully inhabit her Syrian identity. Thinking back on how profoundly her encounter with the women from Hama when she was thirteen had impacted her, she realized that she was drawn—scientifically—to peoples displaced by violence.
At her lab at the Hashemite University, she’d done groundbreaking work in the preceding years, compiling DNA databases from Circassians and Chechens, populations that centuries before had fled violence in their homelands and found safe haven in Jordan. Because Circassians and Chechens had only recently begun to marry outside their communities, they were still, genetically speaking, unique ethnic groups. This made it easier to identify risk factors for certain diseases that scientists could build on for prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Indeed, her team discovered a novel gene risk factor for diabetes.
In 2015, though, her interest was growing in the emerging field of epigenetics, which examines how factors like the environment can influence our genes without changing our actual DNA sequence. Epigeneticists also seek to understand if these changes can be reversed and whether they get passed onto future generations. The environmental condition that most interested Rana was violence.
Other scientists had looked at violence and its effects on human health, but their starting framework didn’t sit well with Rana. It was treated as a given that violence rendered those who experienced it as “damaged,” and that frustrated her. Maybe violence had caused epigenetic changes that were simply neutral, or even positive. Rana believed the emphasis on victimization clouded scientific investigations and consequent interpretations of how violence impacted people, in turn allowing for interventions that were faulty in their design. She bristled when this framing reduced the Global South to a population in need of saving by Western NGOs.
Rana remembered the women from Hama—not only their pain and grief but also how they’d adapted, rebuilt their lives and even thrived.
Already in Jordan, with so many Syrian refugees present, she’d seen researchers from other disciplines try to measure the impact of the violence in Syria on Syrians. In addition to replicating what she saw as a skewed starting framework, Rana also thought their methods—such as surveys and interviews—left room for error, subjective as they were. She preferred an epigenetic inquiry. After all, she says, the body doesn’t lie.
Syrians’ displacement outside of Syria meant they (and their bodies) were now also outside of the regime’s control. With no joy over the circumstances of their formation, Rana had been provided the perfect conditions for her science.
Syria 2025
In December 2024, the Assad regime finally collapsed. Many factors led to its demise, but in the end, the Sunni Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) assumed control of the country, and its leader Ahmad al-Sharaa—a former Syrian jihadist in Iraq who at different points had pledged loyalty to both Al Qaeda and ISIS—emerged as the new leader of what has been promised to be a transitional government in a Syria for all its peoples.
Exiled Syrians rushed back, many eager to be part of building the new state and to not cede that critical function to the ideologues now in charge, who were themselves known for past acts of violence against the Syrian people. (HTS had run a de facto state in the northwest, where it engaged in torture, attacks on civilians, arbitrary arrests—particularly of journalists, activists and civilians voicing criticism of HTS—and restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly.) But now, almost everyone expressed a willingness to turn a new page for the sake of the country, especially as al-Sharaa professed an evolution in his methods and ideology. As celebratory as Syrians were that the Assad regime was gone, no one was naïve about how precarious the future was and what fissures could quickly derail it.
Both the “secular” regime and the armed Islamist groups had victimized other sects in the name of the sects they had claimed, whether cynically or dogmatically, to represent. In doing so, both sides not only failed to see other sects’ members as individual humans but also stripped their own members of their individuality. In that context and in many Syrians’ eyes, individual perpetrators and victims were representatives of entire communities, whether or not they were involved with the regime or had done anything to resist it. Guilt—and righteousness—didn’t have to be earned. They were collective.
To stave off what could rapidly descend into a vicious cycle of revenge and reprisal, sober Syrians moved quickly to demand mechanisms of accountability that would look at victims and perpetrators as individuals, a task that was complicated by the fact that so many had contributed, to varying degrees, to the suffering of others. But these discussions had barely begun when fresh killings shook the country. In March, remnants from the old regime—which had retreated to the coastal areas where the Assads and many others from their Alawite sect are from—lured fighters from the new government into a bloody ambush. In the ensuing battle, Alawite civilians were also targeted and slaughtered. Al-Sharaa quickly pledged to hold perpetrators of the crimes accountable and established a fact-finding committee to investigate the events, as well as a committee to maintain civil peace. So far, several people have been arrested while Syrians await the final findings, due in mid-July. In the meantime, credible evidence has already emerged that members of the Syrian leadership were involved.
While many Syrians condemned the violence in its immediate aftermath, plenty of people also offered justifications and obfuscations. There was indifference and even some satisfaction that it happened to them. Other reactions strained credulity; some Syrians, who had said little or nothing about the regime’s violence over the course of the civil war, said that the depravity of the coastal killings was “unimaginable.” But—without diminishing what happened and continues to happen, or the absolute necessity for accountability no matter where it leads—what violence could possibly be unimaginable in Syria after all these years?
Clearly we hadn’t all been sharing the same narrative of what had transpired between us, let alone the same reality. In the momentary calm after Assad’s fall, Syrians who had fared better under the regime or been spared the worst had maybe begun to confront some of the uncomfortable nuances of privilege and power in the old Syria. But the violence now directed at them seemed almost like absolution, freeing them of not only their discomfort but of any need to reconcile with the past. Meanwhile, the depravity of the new government’s fighters seemed to prove—if it still needed proving—that no Syrian community had a monopoly on evil, or virtue.
If violence visited on and committed by Syrians did not make them feel empathy or solidarity or understanding, could it at least make people feel even? If everyone—every them—experienced it (and committed it) and no one—no them—had escaped it, could this sick equality offer a faster justice? And with time, could the past be left to history, and would the sins and pains of an older generation just die with the birth of a new one?
Amman, Jordan and Gainesville, Florida 2025
In 2015, as Rana followed her curiosity and shifted her work toward epigenetics, she had begun looking for Syrians to participate in a study she was starting to design. In these years, as Syria came apart, much had been said about what violence had turned the country and its people into. Rana wanted to know: What did the body have to say?
The question at the heart of the study she proposed was whether epigenetic changes occurred in the genomes of people subjected to extreme violence, and whether these changes (if any) were passed onto subsequent generations. If she were being honest, Rana was hoping that the science would prove that Syrians were not condemned to lesser lives, to being victims in perpetuity.
Thanks to an abundance of obscenity—Syrians had been subjected to extreme violence not only across decades but also across generations—the conditions existed to look at the harder question in epigenetics: whether changes appear in descendants who were not subjected to the initial environmental catalyst. Rana knew exactly which incident of violence to use as ground zero; it was the same one that had first shown her up close what trauma looked like: the 1982 Hama massacre. She had experienced those intimate moments with the women from Hama who’d taken refuge in her home, and focusing on women now, she thought, would allow her to answer the intergenerational inquiry.
Over the course of ten years, Rana and her team in Jordan followed three different Syrian family cohorts across three generations: a grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughters. In the first cohort were grandmothers pregnant during the Hama massacre, their daughters who were in utero at the time and their granddaughters. In the second were grandmothers who were pregnant in 1982 but not exposed to the Hama massacre; their daughters, who were pregnant and exposed to trauma when the Syrian civil uprising and war began in 2011; and their granddaughters, who were either directly exposed as children or in utero. In the third, a control group, all three generations had not been exposed to violence.
With a research lab at the University of Florida, the scientists looked at 850,000 sites in the genome and found that fourteen had an epigenetic modification in the children whose grandmothers were exposed to violent trauma when pregnant, compared to children whose grandmothers were not exposed to violent trauma. Essentially, they found that trauma induced changes to the body—in its very programming—that were indeed intergenerational.
Violence had not just wrought metaphorical transformations in Syrians, turning them at points into bystanders, accomplices, exiles, perpetrators, victims and (for now) a free people. It had also turned their bodies and even their unborn children into repositories of what had happened—a powerful rebuke to what has happened in other post-conflict situations, where evidence can be destroyed and memory contested, nationalized, constructed, imposed, denied, or belong only to the victor. The body, it turned out, does not forget.
But what exactly had it retained?
While it’s possible to think that these epigenetic changes must be inherently bad, caused as they are by violence, Rana sees them as neither intrinsically positive nor negative. Indeed, the sites where the changes occurred were new to the scientists; as of yet, no one knows what their functions are. What they do know is that the sites are not part of those many pathways already known to relate to disease.
For Rana, the violence the women had suffered had bequeathed something to their future generations; nevertheless, she wasn’t so sure that these children had inherited their grandmothers’ trauma. She was willing to reframe the inquiry, to consider instead that maybe those sites of epigenetic change might play a role in humans’ evolving ability to cope with the unpredictable and violent nature of our world. The body, she says, adapts.
Damascus, Syria 2025
My conversations with Rana allowed me to grapple with a region I have known and covered intimately for years in a way that was completely foreign to me. Yet between my work—at times a granular examination of people’s lives—and her cellular exploration of their bodies, there was also the familiar.
Her assertion that the body adapts, a reframing of how the legacy of violence affects future generations, reminded me of the many people I have interviewed who credit their pain—or that of their ancestors—with making them who they are, and even wear it as a badge of honor. In recent years, though, there has been a hesitation about, if not aversion to, celebrating resilience, particularly in the Levant. After all, if a people will always rise again, is there any moral violation in constantly knocking them down?
With violence very much a condition of this planet, I imagine if we are to survive, we will continue to adapt to it, to evolve under its tutelage. But I’m unsettled by the suggestion that adaptation might also mean getting used to violence or moving through life in a constant dissociative state. What happened in Hama in 1982 remained a horror in Syrians’ minds—and we never saw it. From 2011 onwards, when the world saw some of what was happening in Syria, any initial recoil from the violence soon gave way to a shrug. Now that we see it daily from Gaza, we go on with our lives. And we haven’t even been driven mad.
Thinking that proof of having been subject to violence was only part of the equation for justice, that we also need proof that people had committed violence, I kept asking Rana, could we study the changes to the genome of perpetrators of violence? Who do they become?
And the spectator, the bystander? Who do we become?
Art credit: Kevork Mourad, The Last Prayer, 2024. Acrylic on linen, 21 × 26 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Hama, Syria 1982
In February 1982, when Hafez al-Assad—in a final bid to decimate the opposition—killed and disappeared tens of thousands of people in Hama, almost no one inside or outside Syria knew exactly how many were dead. It was the culmination of over a decade-long struggle by Assad to cement his rule, years in which people were arrested, tortured, summarily executed or forever disappeared into the regime’s dungeons. Even speaking to another of what had happened, what was happening, could incur a Syrian any of these violences.
Hama, a city on the banks of the Orontes River, had become the center of the opposition, which was an array of interests that had coalesced around the most organized of the groups, the Muslim Brotherhood. This included communists and Christians, even though the Brotherhood was Islamist, pro-capitalist and anti-statist. Before Assad launched an all-out assault on the city, violent confrontations with his opponents had reached a fever pitch, and the end of Assad’s rule seemed inevitable, even natural. At the very least, it would have been fantastical to suggest the regime would endure till the last days of 2024.
This longevity, Syrians believed, had to be proof that the outside world did not know what had happened in Hama, and therefore had not grasped the true and brutal nature of the regime. If only they had seen, they would have been moved to act. But in 1982, the regime was able to impose a complete media blackout. That things could have been different would remain an untested hypothesis.
The regime was also able to suppress any conversation about what had happened, and so inside Syria, it was as if it never had. A pervasive security and intelligence apparatus, employing a network of ruthless thugs, surveilled the population and eavesdropped on their conversations. Transgressions against silence were quickly met with violence, which effectively enforced this official amnesia. Those whose exact fates after Hama were unknown became either corpses or worse. Everyone else in Syria was transformed too—at the very least into bystanders of this evil.
Amman, Jordan 1982
For thirteen-year-old Rana Dajani, the arrival at her home in Amman of sisters Umayma and Sumaya from Hama, just weeks after the massacres, was her first intimate exposure to acute trauma, one that would shape the course of her professional life. The daughter of a Palestinian father forcibly displaced from his home in West Jerusalem with the founding of the state of Israel, violence and loss were hardly an abstraction to Rana. She had also listened with her parents to the nightly radio broadcasts from a Baghdad-based opposition station about what was happening in Hama, where her Syrian mother was originally from. Yet when the sisters (her mother’s cousins) came to their house and were soon joined by many other women who had fled Syria with their children but not their men—who had been tortured, killed or disappeared—Rana was suddenly immersed in both their pain and their survival.
Her family was four years back from Iowa, where her father had specialized as an allergist-immunologist and become a successful physician. But in Iowa, her mother, whose faith in Islam had deepened, felt strongly that their skills belonged in the Arab world; they’d settled in Amman because Rana’s father had Jordanian citizenship. Their home was her mother’s domain, and she managed it in the mold of the strict Franciscan nuns who ran the school she had attended as a girl in Syria. When the women began fleeing Hama, Rana’s mother took many of them in as they rebuilt their lives.
Already at home, Rana had her rituals. She studied the Qur’an with her mother, working diligently to learn it by heart to recite from memory back to her. Her father, whose eyesight was ailing, would have Rana read to him every night from Scientific American and National Geographic. Once the women came, Rana spent hours with them after school and on weekends. She was there when they wept and there when they sang songs of prayer to God for relief. “In hardship and ease, I seek refuge in Your protection throughout my life,” they’d sing. “Help me, O my support, and bestow upon me dew from Your hands.”
Hama, Syria 1992
Ten years after the massacres in Hama, in 1992, I visited the city—where my grandmother’s family is from—for the first time. My parents were both born in Damascus, and until 1980, I had spent my summers there. But in June 1980, Islamists had attempted to assassinate Hafez al-Assad. His brother extracted swift and brutal revenge by massacring over one thousand inmates at the infamous prison in Tadmour (Palmyra). The day after, regime men took my grandmother’s brother, and two days later his bullet-riddled corpse was found dumped in a ditch by the side of the road. His family was told not to seek justice or they’d share his fate. His murder helped convince my parents to stay in the U.S., even as they had been planning our family’s return as soon as my father finished his training. Eventually, my parents became Americans, even if begrudgingly.
In Hama, I stayed at the apartment building that my long-deceased great-grandfather had built. He and my great-grandmother had lived on the ground floor with its garden, while each of the five floors above belonged to one of his sons, including the murdered one. I’d come for a family wedding, and the apartment building was right behind the church where the ceremony was to take place. The church itself had been destroyed in the 1982 assault, but the Christian community had quickly repaired it. With this swift restoration they’d done what was expected of Syrians: partake in the erasure of evidence and memory of what had happened in Hama.
Back in 1982, the family building had stood higher than others in the city. As I looked up at it in the sun, a relative, who was Lebanese and had the audacity of an outsider, whispered in my ear that when Assad decimated Hama, the regime’s snipers had commandeered “our” rooftop. I felt a sickening sense of guilt, even as I knew that I—like most Syrians—was not at fault.
Then a teenager, I had only a vague understanding of the specifics but a clear sense of the menace. Violence may have been as invisible as it was ever present, but I knew enough to know that in just this exchange of words, my relative and I had transgressed. We were not only to act as if the massacre hadn’t happened but also as if we never knew it had happened. Had the bystanders in the intervening years become accomplices?
Damascus, Syria 2011
Until 2011, the legacy of Hama endured; Syrians’ lives were clearly circumscribed and controlled, and Syrians who wanted to stay in the country acquiesced to the regime’s rule and rules. Multiple generations of Syrians were living in a perpetual present, with a past that only went as far back as the last coup, which brought the Assad regime to power in 1970. In 2000, after Hafez al-Assad died, his son Bashar al-Assad had inherited the presidency.
The Arab Spring broke that stagnation. Peaceful demonstrators across Syria’s many ethnic and religious lines asked for reforms, euphoric that the future seemed to have finally arrived, just as it appeared to have done in Tunisia and Egypt. Instead, the regime met the protesters with violence, claiming they were defending the country from foreign-funded jihadists. Eventually, inevitably, some Syrians answered the government’s violence with violence of their own. I was living in Damascus by then.
In February 2012, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Hama massacre and nearly a year into the people’s uprising against Assad the younger, the regime launched its bloodiest assault yet—this time on Homs, Hama’s historical rival city. It would last all February. Though the month, with its condensed and dark days, was the shortest of the year, it seemed endless.
While we’d never know if the regime’s timing was coincidental or intentional, we’d finally be able to answer what Syrians had wondered for thirty years: What would have happened if the world could have seen what the regime had done to its own people in Hama? Unlike in 1982, because of social media and smartphones, photographic and video evidence could now be readily captured, disseminated and seen—by anyone who wanted to see.
In the end, the regime employed many means to kill: conventional and chemical weapons, bombardment, siege and starvation. It even used torture as a means of execution. While there was an unarmed opposition, they were quickly sidelined. Soon, unholy holy warriors joined in, each faction competing in a one-upmanship in barbarity. External nations picked (and armed) their sides, and Western nations refereed by bombing swaths of the country. Some half a million Syrians lost their lives, at the hands of the regime but also those of its opponents. Others lost their homes, their futures, their families, their minds and their faith in a world that just had to see in order to act.
Amman, Jordan 2015
Though Syrians had begun to flee their country’s violence almost immediately, most of the world didn’t take notice until 2015, when the country’s unraveling saw half a million Syrians take to the sea they had always shared with Europe. Syrians were met with some empathy in the European Union, but also much hand-wringing as well as downright antipathy. For the EU, what to do with the sudden influx of refugees via the Mediterranean became a major political fault line and, to some degree, began to break the Union apart. The vast majority of Syrian refugees, however, ended up in neighboring countries—Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan—where they’d been arriving since 2011.
Rana Dajani, now 46 and a molecular biologist, also felt that she was—for the first time—a Syrian. She’d always claimed her Palestinian and Jordanian identities—even her Iowan one, after a Fulbright brought her back to (of all places) the University of Iowa. But only once the Syrian uprising started, and more than 1.3 million Syrians arrived in Jordan, did she begin to fully inhabit her Syrian identity. Thinking back on how profoundly her encounter with the women from Hama when she was thirteen had impacted her, she realized that she was drawn—scientifically—to peoples displaced by violence.
At her lab at the Hashemite University, she’d done groundbreaking work in the preceding years, compiling DNA databases from Circassians and Chechens, populations that centuries before had fled violence in their homelands and found safe haven in Jordan. Because Circassians and Chechens had only recently begun to marry outside their communities, they were still, genetically speaking, unique ethnic groups. This made it easier to identify risk factors for certain diseases that scientists could build on for prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Indeed, her team discovered a novel gene risk factor for diabetes.
In 2015, though, her interest was growing in the emerging field of epigenetics, which examines how factors like the environment can influence our genes without changing our actual DNA sequence. Epigeneticists also seek to understand if these changes can be reversed and whether they get passed onto future generations. The environmental condition that most interested Rana was violence.
Other scientists had looked at violence and its effects on human health, but their starting framework didn’t sit well with Rana. It was treated as a given that violence rendered those who experienced it as “damaged,” and that frustrated her. Maybe violence had caused epigenetic changes that were simply neutral, or even positive. Rana believed the emphasis on victimization clouded scientific investigations and consequent interpretations of how violence impacted people, in turn allowing for interventions that were faulty in their design. She bristled when this framing reduced the Global South to a population in need of saving by Western NGOs.
Rana remembered the women from Hama—not only their pain and grief but also how they’d adapted, rebuilt their lives and even thrived.
Already in Jordan, with so many Syrian refugees present, she’d seen researchers from other disciplines try to measure the impact of the violence in Syria on Syrians. In addition to replicating what she saw as a skewed starting framework, Rana also thought their methods—such as surveys and interviews—left room for error, subjective as they were. She preferred an epigenetic inquiry. After all, she says, the body doesn’t lie.
Syrians’ displacement outside of Syria meant they (and their bodies) were now also outside of the regime’s control. With no joy over the circumstances of their formation, Rana had been provided the perfect conditions for her science.
Syria 2025
In December 2024, the Assad regime finally collapsed. Many factors led to its demise, but in the end, the Sunni Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) assumed control of the country, and its leader Ahmad al-Sharaa—a former Syrian jihadist in Iraq who at different points had pledged loyalty to both Al Qaeda and ISIS—emerged as the new leader of what has been promised to be a transitional government in a Syria for all its peoples.
Exiled Syrians rushed back, many eager to be part of building the new state and to not cede that critical function to the ideologues now in charge, who were themselves known for past acts of violence against the Syrian people. (HTS had run a de facto state in the northwest, where it engaged in torture, attacks on civilians, arbitrary arrests—particularly of journalists, activists and civilians voicing criticism of HTS—and restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly.) But now, almost everyone expressed a willingness to turn a new page for the sake of the country, especially as al-Sharaa professed an evolution in his methods and ideology. As celebratory as Syrians were that the Assad regime was gone, no one was naïve about how precarious the future was and what fissures could quickly derail it.
Both the “secular” regime and the armed Islamist groups had victimized other sects in the name of the sects they had claimed, whether cynically or dogmatically, to represent. In doing so, both sides not only failed to see other sects’ members as individual humans but also stripped their own members of their individuality. In that context and in many Syrians’ eyes, individual perpetrators and victims were representatives of entire communities, whether or not they were involved with the regime or had done anything to resist it. Guilt—and righteousness—didn’t have to be earned. They were collective.
To stave off what could rapidly descend into a vicious cycle of revenge and reprisal, sober Syrians moved quickly to demand mechanisms of accountability that would look at victims and perpetrators as individuals, a task that was complicated by the fact that so many had contributed, to varying degrees, to the suffering of others. But these discussions had barely begun when fresh killings shook the country. In March, remnants from the old regime—which had retreated to the coastal areas where the Assads and many others from their Alawite sect are from—lured fighters from the new government into a bloody ambush. In the ensuing battle, Alawite civilians were also targeted and slaughtered. Al-Sharaa quickly pledged to hold perpetrators of the crimes accountable and established a fact-finding committee to investigate the events, as well as a committee to maintain civil peace. So far, several people have been arrested while Syrians await the final findings, due in mid-July. In the meantime, credible evidence has already emerged that members of the Syrian leadership were involved.
While many Syrians condemned the violence in its immediate aftermath, plenty of people also offered justifications and obfuscations. There was indifference and even some satisfaction that it happened to them. Other reactions strained credulity; some Syrians, who had said little or nothing about the regime’s violence over the course of the civil war, said that the depravity of the coastal killings was “unimaginable.” But—without diminishing what happened and continues to happen, or the absolute necessity for accountability no matter where it leads—what violence could possibly be unimaginable in Syria after all these years?
Clearly we hadn’t all been sharing the same narrative of what had transpired between us, let alone the same reality. In the momentary calm after Assad’s fall, Syrians who had fared better under the regime or been spared the worst had maybe begun to confront some of the uncomfortable nuances of privilege and power in the old Syria. But the violence now directed at them seemed almost like absolution, freeing them of not only their discomfort but of any need to reconcile with the past. Meanwhile, the depravity of the new government’s fighters seemed to prove—if it still needed proving—that no Syrian community had a monopoly on evil, or virtue.
If violence visited on and committed by Syrians did not make them feel empathy or solidarity or understanding, could it at least make people feel even? If everyone—every them—experienced it (and committed it) and no one—no them—had escaped it, could this sick equality offer a faster justice? And with time, could the past be left to history, and would the sins and pains of an older generation just die with the birth of a new one?
Amman, Jordan and Gainesville, Florida 2025
In 2015, as Rana followed her curiosity and shifted her work toward epigenetics, she had begun looking for Syrians to participate in a study she was starting to design. In these years, as Syria came apart, much had been said about what violence had turned the country and its people into. Rana wanted to know: What did the body have to say?
The question at the heart of the study she proposed was whether epigenetic changes occurred in the genomes of people subjected to extreme violence, and whether these changes (if any) were passed onto subsequent generations. If she were being honest, Rana was hoping that the science would prove that Syrians were not condemned to lesser lives, to being victims in perpetuity.
Thanks to an abundance of obscenity—Syrians had been subjected to extreme violence not only across decades but also across generations—the conditions existed to look at the harder question in epigenetics: whether changes appear in descendants who were not subjected to the initial environmental catalyst. Rana knew exactly which incident of violence to use as ground zero; it was the same one that had first shown her up close what trauma looked like: the 1982 Hama massacre. She had experienced those intimate moments with the women from Hama who’d taken refuge in her home, and focusing on women now, she thought, would allow her to answer the intergenerational inquiry.
Over the course of ten years, Rana and her team in Jordan followed three different Syrian family cohorts across three generations: a grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughters. In the first cohort were grandmothers pregnant during the Hama massacre, their daughters who were in utero at the time and their granddaughters. In the second were grandmothers who were pregnant in 1982 but not exposed to the Hama massacre; their daughters, who were pregnant and exposed to trauma when the Syrian civil uprising and war began in 2011; and their granddaughters, who were either directly exposed as children or in utero. In the third, a control group, all three generations had not been exposed to violence.
With a research lab at the University of Florida, the scientists looked at 850,000 sites in the genome and found that fourteen had an epigenetic modification in the children whose grandmothers were exposed to violent trauma when pregnant, compared to children whose grandmothers were not exposed to violent trauma. Essentially, they found that trauma induced changes to the body—in its very programming—that were indeed intergenerational.
Violence had not just wrought metaphorical transformations in Syrians, turning them at points into bystanders, accomplices, exiles, perpetrators, victims and (for now) a free people. It had also turned their bodies and even their unborn children into repositories of what had happened—a powerful rebuke to what has happened in other post-conflict situations, where evidence can be destroyed and memory contested, nationalized, constructed, imposed, denied, or belong only to the victor. The body, it turned out, does not forget.
But what exactly had it retained?
While it’s possible to think that these epigenetic changes must be inherently bad, caused as they are by violence, Rana sees them as neither intrinsically positive nor negative. Indeed, the sites where the changes occurred were new to the scientists; as of yet, no one knows what their functions are. What they do know is that the sites are not part of those many pathways already known to relate to disease.
For Rana, the violence the women had suffered had bequeathed something to their future generations; nevertheless, she wasn’t so sure that these children had inherited their grandmothers’ trauma. She was willing to reframe the inquiry, to consider instead that maybe those sites of epigenetic change might play a role in humans’ evolving ability to cope with the unpredictable and violent nature of our world. The body, she says, adapts.
Damascus, Syria 2025
My conversations with Rana allowed me to grapple with a region I have known and covered intimately for years in a way that was completely foreign to me. Yet between my work—at times a granular examination of people’s lives—and her cellular exploration of their bodies, there was also the familiar.
Her assertion that the body adapts, a reframing of how the legacy of violence affects future generations, reminded me of the many people I have interviewed who credit their pain—or that of their ancestors—with making them who they are, and even wear it as a badge of honor. In recent years, though, there has been a hesitation about, if not aversion to, celebrating resilience, particularly in the Levant. After all, if a people will always rise again, is there any moral violation in constantly knocking them down?
With violence very much a condition of this planet, I imagine if we are to survive, we will continue to adapt to it, to evolve under its tutelage. But I’m unsettled by the suggestion that adaptation might also mean getting used to violence or moving through life in a constant dissociative state. What happened in Hama in 1982 remained a horror in Syrians’ minds—and we never saw it. From 2011 onwards, when the world saw some of what was happening in Syria, any initial recoil from the violence soon gave way to a shrug. Now that we see it daily from Gaza, we go on with our lives. And we haven’t even been driven mad.
Thinking that proof of having been subject to violence was only part of the equation for justice, that we also need proof that people had committed violence, I kept asking Rana, could we study the changes to the genome of perpetrators of violence? Who do they become?
And the spectator, the bystander? Who do we become?
Art credit: Kevork Mourad, The Last Prayer, 2024. Acrylic on linen, 21 × 26 in. Courtesy of the artist.
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