It was a rainy Friday afternoon in the summer of 2011 in Damascus, Syria. For 20-year-old college student Hesham Moamadani, shuffling through the soaked crowd of over 1,000 alongside his older brother Ghiath — whose name, in Arabic, also stands for rain — was a typical ritual at this time of week. Immediately after Friday prayers at the local mosque was the only time when Moamadani and his brother could be amidst such a large crowd of people. For Bashar al-Assad, the totalitarian dictator who had ruled Syria for nearly 10 years by 2011, large public gatherings were a sacrilege; a mass could be potent, dangerous.

This time around, though, something was different. Moamadani and his brother were a part of the Shield of Daryya, one of many online Facebook groups that emerged from the boom of internet activism during the Syrian Revolution. Like many other online resistance networks, they organized protests directly beneath the nose of the Assad regime’s stringent censorship. The crowd had assembled that day with a knowing conviction. In a defiant move, someone had begun chanting “hurriya” — freedom. Moamadani and his brother followed. The crowd chanted hurriya repeatedly, fists pumping in the air, entranced by their neighbors’ hope-drenched vigor. Then, the buses full of men arrived, and the bullets, too, began raining from the sky.

***

When I saw Moadamani for the first time in Berlin, Germany, nearly a year after the fall of the Assad regime, the weather was eerily similar to that fateful afternoon 14 years ago in Damascus, a coincidence he described as “beautiful.” Even in the dreary humidity of the rainy day, the scent of tobacco wafted from his shirt when he embraced me like an old friend from another lifetime.

In March 2011, the embers of Syrian dissent against the Assad family’s nearly 50-year-long reign of terror had erupted into the flames of the Syrian Revolution. Darayya, a small suburb West of Damascus and Moamadani’s hometown, stood as a flashpoint of anti-Assadist resistance and pacifist protests. Now 34, Moamadani betrayed little of his harrowing life in his handsome face and the toothy grin that seemed to accompany him in perpetuity. “He’s incredibly friendly, incredibly generous,” said Mada al-Zoabi, a friend of Moamadani and a senior at Bard College Berlin, who recalled her first impression of him. “He’s also just so funny.”

In between bites of his chicken shawarma, Moamadani recalled his life under Assad’s violent dictatorship. We were sitting at a Levantine restaurant in Neukölln, Berlin’s well-known Arab neighborhood. “The death toll was almost 2,000 people a day,” he said.

Moamadani, who lived with his parents, siblings, and half-siblings in Darayya throughout his childhood, recounted that war never occurred to him as even a remote possibility. “You don’t think it’s possible, until it happens to you,” he said. By the time the war broke out, Moamadani was 20, studying law as an undergraduate at Damascus University. His education informed his commitment to anti-Assadist resistance, which he engaged with for nearly 2 years after the start of the war. “When I was [studying] law, the first thought that came to my mind was, what’s the purpose of my law degree under a strict dictatorship?” he said.

But by June 2012 — almost one year after the start of the Syrian Civil War — the situation had significantly worsened. Around 3000 Free Syrian Army (FSA) soldiers, a decentralized insurgent rebel group, had made Darayya their stronghold. By August, however, the suburb underwent heavy shelling by the pro-Assad militias, and the rebel groups withdrew. Faced with little resistance, the military began a rampage, indiscriminately carpet bombing residential neighborhoods and executing any townspeople suspected of being rebels. By August 25, nearly 300 townspeople had been killed by the military, with around 80 of the dead identified as civilians according to Reuters. (Moamadani suggests a number closer to 1500).

“I would go and hide with other activists and move from apartment to apartment,” Moamadani said. “They would divide the city into blocks, then [clear] it block by block, [planting] snipers then moving to the next block.” After jumping from block to block in hiding, Moamadani recalled spending nearly six hours in the middle of the night attempting to return home, which was less than two miles away. While it was safer to move at night when most militia members were asleep, snipers bedecked the roofs of residential buildings and shot at first sight. “You had to walk over the dead bodies [strewn] across the street,” he added.

Moamadani was reaching a breaking point. He was terrified for his own and his family’s safety, perpetually in jeopardy from his activist history. So he left, paying an acquaintance to drive him to Lebanon. He eventually made his way to Egypt, where he would attempt to enroll in an Egyptian university to complete his law degree. He was too late — the academic year had begun in August, and he’d arrived in September.

That dejected 20-year-old Moamadani never could have imagined that it would take him nearly 3 years and a trip back to Syria before setting foot in Germany. Destitute and jobless in Egypt, Moamadani had few remaining options but to return to an even more war-torn Syria, where it took him nearly 6 months to return home due to the extensive siege of major Syrian cities by the Assadist government.

By the time he finally returned, he already wanted to leave. “It was unlivable,” he recounted.

***

It was Hesham Moamadani’s third time ever swimming in the ocean.

The first two instances occurred in Latakia, Syria, a coastal city in Western Syria facing the Mediterranean. It was the highlight of a family road trip before the war had begun. This time, though, the entirety of his belongings — his passport, phone, some valuables, candy bars — had been dropped in a plastic bag and wrapped in nylon. Unlike his road trip to Latakia, Moamadani didn’t know if he could return home — or where ‘home’ even would be, should his journey be successful.

Moamadani had embarked on the longest swim of his life: eight hours, from the shores of Çeşme, Turkey, to the Greek Island of Chios, alongside a stranger he met named Feras Abukhalil less than 24 hours before. After a “miraculous” arrival in Chios, Moamadani trod on foot through Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and then eventually to Germany, where he would settle for the next decade of his life.

After obtaining a full-ride scholarship to Bard College Berlin and graduating in 2021 with a degree in Economics, Politics, and Social Thought, Moamadani became a journalist at Mnemonic, an NGO that provides an open-source database for war crimes and rights violations in Syria. In 2024, he became a Civic Engagement Officer at his alma mater. Albeit continuing to grapple with his complex past and trauma, he finally felt like he was settling into life in Berlin. Then the Assad regime fell.

“I got my German citizenship the same week the dictatorship ended,” he said, recalling the surreal moment his two nationalities — one by birth and the other by naturalization — emerged at a crossroads. It was a climactic moment for an identity crisis and a lingering sentiment of guilt that, according to Moamadani, had plagued him since his departure.

After Assad’s fall, Western countries have implemented a string of updates to their migration policies, urging Syrians to return home. Last September, the United States suspended the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program for Syrian refugees, which had allowed Syrian nationals to work and live in the U.S., but wasn’t a direct path to citizenship. The German government escalated attempts to repatriate Syrian refugees to their home country. “The only people who want to leave Syria now are criminals,” said Anwar Bunni, a Syrian lawyer and human rights activist.

But for many Syrians like Moamadani, the idea of a permanent return generates hesitance. “It’s not like the country was taken by Assad and [by] December given [back] to us,” he said. “There was a release of tension [when] the dictatorship was over. But there are consequences: they still discover graves, memories, [and] you’ve changed as a person.” Moamadani’s friend, al-Zoabi, who is also Syrian, reiterated this sentiment. “The international consensus seems to be, well, ‘that’s solved’, you know. But [Syria] is obviously in a state of instability,” she said.

Moamadani once “dreamt” about the day the war would be over. If that day, he thought, would ever come, he imagined that Syrians — including himself — would pack their bags immediately and ‘return home’. But for a nation with an infrastructure in ruins and a raw history of stark suffering yet to be reckoned with, it’s easier said than done. And in the decade since the beginning of the war, Syrians have established new lives in their communities that are now reliant on them. To some, then, ‘home’ is where they are now. But to others like Moamadani, ‘home’ no longer exists. “The term ‘never going home’ applies, because it is not there, [and] it is not here.”