“Does your family know you’re going?” the police officer at the Harasta bus station office asked me as I stood with my colleague, waiting for our receipt to be stamped before we set off together for Aleppo.

At first, I laughed. I didn’t understand why he was asking me this or what the question meant to him. It sounded like something straight out of my childhood, from the days when I would play outside the house and one of the neighbors might ask the same thing.

But the officer was not joking. He repeated the question seriously, then asked me to call a member of my family so he could make sure that I was going of my own free will and that my family knew where I was going and with whom.

I told him I would call my husband, not my family. When I did, my husband spoke to the officer and told him where I was going and who I was traveling with. Satisfied, the officer stamped the receipt and wished us a safe journey.

The whole exchange lasted no more than a few minutes, but the question stayed with me throughout the journey to Aleppo. Why did a police officer, in 2026, need to make sure that a 32-year-old woman was not “running away” from one place to another within her own country?

Syrian law does not prevent a woman from traveling within the country with a male colleague, nor does it require her to obtain permission from her husband or family to travel between governorates. Even the forms of guardianship stipulated by law in certain cases of travel abroad do not apply to this journey.

And yet, I found myself subject to a form of guardianship that existed nowhere on paper: an unwritten, verbal permission that I obtained through a phone call simply so I could continue on my way.

I did not know then that this small incident would become my entry point into much larger questions. These questions would emerge one after another during the weeks I spent in Aleppo alongside Syrian and foreign journalists from different regions, sects, and backgrounds.

There, away from official documents and written laws, every place seemed to have its own rules, every community its own sensitivities, and every person a wound they wanted seen and acknowledged. Amid all these wounds, personal freedom sometimes seemed less clear-cut than we had imagined after the fall of the regime.

When Protection Becomes Guardianship

Once, we were on our way to the Aleppo Citadel. A colleague of mine, a journalist from the city, was walking with us when she suddenly stopped in front of me. She looked at my loose-fitting, long-sleeved shirt, then reached over and fastened a few of its buttons.

She told me she would hail the taxi herself, then added: “We don’t dress like this here. When you go back to Suwayda, wear whatever you like.”

She did not say it as a threat. Quite the opposite: her tone sounded more like advice, even protection.

But the problem lay elsewhere. Who decided that what I was wearing required protection? And who decided that what was acceptable in Suwayda became inappropriate in Aleppo?

Similarly, the question echoed the one the police officer asked at the Harasta bus station. In both cases, there was no written rule, only another person who believed they knew what was best for me.

And that was not the only such incident.

Over those weeks, our conversations began to reveal something else: the Syrians gathered around the same table had not arrived there from the same experience. Each of us carried a different country within the same country.

The Aleppo Citadel seems to embody the reality Syrians are living today. The scene around it and along the roads leading to it feels almost cinematic, as though everyone will soon leave the set. People stop along the way to photograph the ruins, the destruction, and the scars left by bombardment. Two days later, they applaud the inauguration of a roundabout in one of Aleppo’s neighborhoods, surrounded by an area that has been almost destroyed.

“You Leave No Room for Us”

During one of our sessions, an Alawite colleague described an incident involving a friend who went to file a harassment complaint. She described how the police had treated her friend and how she felt that her sectarian identity had made that treatment harsher.

Before she could finish, another colleague responded: “We feel that you minorities indulge yourselves with these arguments in the face of the atrocities we endured under the Assad regime. You leave no room for us.”

Her response revealed something that had begun to recur in our conversations: everyone wants to be seen first. Every wound competes with another.

Whenever someone spoke about a violation they had endured, someone on the other side would respond with another violation, as though acknowledging one community’s pain necessarily diminished another’s.

Over time, it became clear that part of the problem was not an unwillingness to speak. Rather, Syrians had emerged from long years in which they had not been allowed to speak at all, only to suddenly find themselves in an open space for conversation, without necessarily having a shared language for navigating it.

And here, another story emerged.

“I’m Sorry for Being Alawite”

One of our Alawite colleagues was listening as a journalist spoke about her experience of violence and abuse under Assad when he said: “I’m sorry for being Alawite.”

The conversation paused for a moment.

The man was not a supporter of the former regime. According to what he told us, he had been a civilian opponent of it and, like many others, had lived through years of repression and fear. Yet he felt compelled to apologize for something he had not done.

And he was not alone.

In later discussions, other Alawites repeatedly felt the need to stress that they did not represent the authorities and had not participated in violations committed in the name of their sect or by members of it.

At the same time, Sunnis found themselves in similar situations, though in a different way: repeatedly having to affirm their rejection of the massacres and abuses committed by government forces on the coast and in Suwayda.

The question was no longer always, “What did you do?” Sometimes, it became: “Who are you?”

And that is where the new burden of identity begins.

On our way back from the citadel, the taxi driver began asking us about our hometowns and accents. We answered: Suwayda, the Damascus countryside, Quneitra. But our Alawite colleague remained silent.

Only minutes earlier, she had been speaking in her own accent, pronouncing the letter qaf in a way familiar to people from the region, yet she was the only one who did not say where she was from.

The driver did not need to ask another question.

“Welcome to Aleppo, my dears,” he said. “All people bring goodness and blessings.”

It was a simple sentence, but it revealed the extent of the caution that now accompanies some Syrians when introducing themselves. Identity is no longer merely a way of saying who you are. In some places, it can become a burden, something you have to think about before revealing.

“We Hid the Flags”

Our Kurdish friend from Qamishli had a different experience.

After years of being absent from Syria’s public sphere, she returned to public life through celebrations and events connected to her identity and culture, particularly Nowruz, which Syrian Kurds were finally granted the right to celebrate officially, for the first time in Syria’s history, through a presidential decree issued earlier this year.

She told us: “On Nowruz, as we were returning from the celebrations after security tensions had broken out, we were told to hide the flags when passing through government checkpoints.”

For her, it was not simply about a flag. It was a test of trust.

How can a community returning to the public sphere after years of marginalization feel safe expressing its identity if it has to conceal that identity at the first checkpoint?

She was talking about fear. But behind that fear was another question: Can the new Syria accommodate different identities as part of society, rather than treating them as a threat?

Suwayda, Too

I was not outside this circle.

During one of our discussions, as we were talking about an Israeli strike on the General Staff headquarters in Damascus, one colleague said to me: “I cannot forget the betrayal when Israel struck the General Staff building in Damascus.”

He did not ask me a direct question, but the remark reached me in a particular capacity: as a journalist from Suwayda.

Once again, I found myself expected to explain or justify a stance I had neither taken nor chosen. At the same time, I was living alongside my own community through the aftermath of a bloody massacre, trying to understand what had happened and survive its consequences.

So I chose to remain silent.

I refused to become a representative of a region or a sect, just as I did not want to be asked to condemn or justify actions that had nothing to do with me.

But the dynamic shifted almost completely later that same day.

A journalist from the Damascus countryside told us about a previous visit to Suwayda and about a feeling she had not experienced in years, when she took part in a demonstration in Karama Square after the fall of the regime.

She said she wanted to return to Suwayda.

For the first time, I found myself on the other side. I was now a member of the majority in my own region. I began reassuring her, explaining that it was safe, encouraging her to visit.

Suddenly, I realized I was doing exactly what my colleague in Aleppo had done to me: exercising the same kind of guardianship, even if it came from good intentions.

“Hopefully Suwayda Will Be Integrated Next”

In another discussion, one colleague said: “Hopefully Suwayda will be integrated next, like the areas under the Autonomous Administration, and we’ll be able to congratulate you on returning to the homeland.”

Perhaps the remark was intended as an expression of hope that all Syrians would once again live under a single state. But it didn’t land that simply with me.

How can we speak of a “return” in a place whose people see themselves as an integral part of Syria, not as a community that ever left it? And how can the blood that has been spilled simply be moved past without acknowledgment, accountability, or redress?

Here, another difference between us emerged. It was not over the idea of a single state, but over what the path toward it should mean.

For some, integration means restoring a unity we have lost. For others, talk of integration, if it comes before reconciliation and justice, can sound like a demand to move past what happened before it has even been acknowledged.

The problem, then, was not a single word. It was the different histories each community carried behind that word.

Who Has the Right to Be a Victim?

During one of our sessions, a colleague from the Aleppo countryside told us about a relative who had joined one of the faz‘at, mobilizations of volunteers responding to calls for armed support, and gone to the coast, despite having no experience handling weapons.

Years earlier, this young man had witnessed his father being killed and his body dragged through the streets by an officer from the coastal region. His mother had begged him not to go, our colleague said, but he told her that he only wanted to see what would happen, “so the rage over what they did to my father might finally cool.”

In that same session, one of our colleagues spoke about the massacres on the coast and in Suwayda, struggling to hold back tears.

Then everyone began revisiting their own memories of the Assad regime: arrests, deaths under torture, bombardment, summonses by the security services, travel bans, relatives lost, and fear.

Everyone had a story.

But something else was happening beneath the words. After years of being denied the space to tell their tragedies, Syrians were now learning how to tell them in front of one another. And that process was not easy.

Often, memory became a competition: Who suffered more? Who paid the highest price? Who was a victim, and who was complicit?

It was as though acknowledging someone else’s tragedy first required reassurance that our own would not be erased.

The Problem Is Not That We Are Different

Weeks after that journey, I returned to the question that had started it all.

At the Harasta bus station, the police officer had no legal provision that entitled him to demand my husband’s permission for me to travel to Aleppo. Nor did my husband, at that moment, have any legal authority to decide whether I could make the journey. And yet, I had to call him before I could continue on my way.

Taken in isolation from everything that followed, the incident might seem like nothing more than a police officer improvising his understanding of his duties. But after those weeks in Aleppo, I could no longer see it so simply.

I remembered the question when I heard a colleague tell an Alawite woman that speaking about her fear of discrimination was a form of “self-indulgence.”

I remembered it when my colleague asked me to change the way I dressed because I was in Aleppo.

I remembered it when our Alawite colleague remained silent about where she came from in front of the taxi driver.

I remembered it when our Kurdish colleague spoke about hiding the flag at checkpoints.

And I remembered it when I found myself reassuring a journalist from the Damascus countryside about Suwayda and encouraging her to visit, as though I alone had the authority to decide whether it was safe.

Each time, the question took a different form, but its essence remained the same: Who has the right to decide what is acceptable for someone else?

These situations were not identical. Nor is the problem that Syrians have suddenly become different from one another. They have always been different.

The problem is that years of war created enormous distances between them. Then the regime’s fall removed some of the political fear that had kept those differences from surfacing, without necessarily removing mutual fear, competing memories, or the need for self-protection.

So when the centralized guardianship the regime had imposed on society disappeared, guardianship itself did not. In some places, it simply shifted into society, from the state to the street, from law to social convention, from the security services to people’s looks, questions, and expectations.

And this is where personal freedom becomes more than a right written on paper. It becomes a daily test:

What do you wear? Who do you travel with? What do you say? What accent do you speak in? Where are you from? And what are you expected to apologize for?

Perhaps Syria today is entering a phase it has never experienced before: a society emerging from a regime that imposed a single definition of how life should be lived, only to find itself confronted with dozens of definitions, each seeking to become the norm.

The state still exists on paper, in institutions and official discourse. But in everyday life, other rules sometimes assert themselves more forcefully: the rules of place, community, religion, memory, majority, minority, and fear.

This does not mean that Syrians are destined for division. On the contrary, perhaps the first step toward citizenship is to acknowledge that these distances truly exist, that justice does not mean choosing one community’s suffering over another’s, and that freedom is not truly freedom when it merely allows me to do what I want. It becomes freedom only when I accept that others have the same right.

At that bus station, I needed a phone call to continue a journey within my own country. In Aleppo, some of my colleagues had to hide their identities, apologize for them, defend them, or justify them.

Perhaps the new Syria does not need a new guardian. What it needs is a shared space where a police officer does not ask a woman whether her husband knows where she is going, where society does not ask a Sunni why they are Sunni, or an Alawite why they should absolve themselves of crimes they did not commit, where a Druze person is not required to prove their position on Israel, and a Kurd does not have to hide their flag, and where no Syrian is forced to justify acts they did not commit before they are allowed simply to be Syrian.

After all these years, Syria needs only a shared space where everyone is equal before the law, where no Syrian needs a certificate of sectarian, regional, or social good conduct to move from one city to another, to express their identity, to say what they believe, or simply to live freely.