Author: Siyeon Lee (Page 1 of 2)

The clock reads 4:18 A.M. when Tareq Alaows and his friends feel their world tilt.

The industrial gleam of three laptops illuminated the darkness of Alaows’ Berlin living room, spitting a flurry of words from the plethora of German news channels. Overlapping audio streams made individual speakers incomprehensible to the unattentive ear. But that December night, the attention of Alaows and his four friends — Syrian, Iranian, German — had been anything but sparing. While they were collectively sleep-deprived from the past few days of the grueling ritual, not a single person wanted to miss the moment that Bashar al-Assad’s reign of terror would crumble to the ground.

“I saw it, and at first, I didn’t believe it. I was too tired to do anything, so I slept for an hour right away.” Alaows said. “[Afterwards,] I immediately … started making social media statements. I knew right away [that] as a political voice here in Germany and … an opponent of the Assad regime, there would be a lot of media inquiries coming my way.” 

Alaows, a Syrian refugee who arrived in Germany in 2015 after fleeing conscription in Syria, was under unique circumstances. He was the first Syrian refugee to run for German Parliament, representing the left-leaning environmentalist Green Party in 2021. After withdrawing his candidacy due to racist threats, his work since then has focused on advising asylum seekers and supporting refugees for ProAsyl, Germany’s largest pro-immigration advocacy organization. 

Alaows was euphoric at Assad’s fall, but his joy fizzled out as quickly as it ensued. A mere few hours after the announcement, Jens Spahn, a German politician and Bundestag (parliament) member of the major center-right Chrsitian Democratic Union (CDU) party, suggested that the German government hand Syrian nationals in Germany 1,000 euros to repatriate them to their Assad-free homeland.

“[He] shamelessly suggested in the media [that] we give every [asylum] seeker 1,000 euros,” Alaows said. 

“I thought, hey, an entire population is trying to understand what happened in the country, and the only thing Jens Spahn is interested in is that people can go straight back.” 

***

Just 10 years ago, stringent opposition to progressive immigration and asylum reform in Germany was considered a part of a minor stream of far-right politics. Today, it is minor no longer.

The AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland), Germany’s populist far-right party that openly embraces mass deportation policies and anti-Islam views, is the second most powerful party in the German Bundestag. They are regarded positively by nearly 20% of the German population, up from 13% in 2016. The AfD became the first far-right party since 1945 to win a German state election.

The rightward cultural shift has generated a profound impact not only on the AfD but also on their more moderate counterparts. The CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) — the center-right political powerhouse that traditionally has held majority seats in the Bundestag— is changing under the face of a metastasizing anti-immigrant culture, with nearly 37% of German voters in January’s Bundestag elections considering ‘migration’ to be one of the two most important ‘political problems’ that lawmakers need to address. Just 10 years ago, Germany’s CDU-led government allowed large numbers of asylum seekers into the country, fueled by progressive political and public sentiment on migration issues. Now, they’ve taken a sharp right turn, its highest-ranking members espousing support to limit migration.  

After a visit to Damascus, Syria, earlier this month, Germany’s Foreign Minister and CDU member Johann Wadephul said in a statement to German news network Deutsche Welle that “hardly anyone can live here [in Syria] with dignity.” Wadephul allegedly made a remark that said today’s “Syria looked worse than postwar Germany” during a meeting in parliament, irking other party colleagues. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, also a member of the CDU whose pointed remarks appeared to address Wadepuhl indirectly, said that “there is no longer any reason for [Syrian] asylum in Germany, and therefore, [Germany] can begin repatriations.” 

For now, voluntary repatriation and deportations of Syrians with criminal records remain at the forefront of the CDU’s repatriation advocacy. But only 0.1% of Germany’s Syrians have voluntarily returned to their homeland a year after Assad’s fall, and the pressure of Germany’s climbing anti-immigrant cultural sentiment remains, even as the number of asylum applications is falling. Those who have already naturalized know that they are lucky. But to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians under more precarious circumstances — such as those with temporary residence permits or a subsidiary protection status — small political shifts can feel potentially life-altering.

***

Since Assad’s fall, a wave of anxiety has ensued amongst many yet-to-be naturalized Syrians or Syrians under more temporary immigration statuses. In 2024, nearly 300,000 people were granted naturalized German citizenship, a record for the nation. Many of them — over 80,000 — were Syrians. 

In 2015, the general path to German naturalization for Syrian refugees required eight years of legal residence, an intermediate level of fluency in German, and the completion and passing of an integration course. A large number of Syrian refugees who arrived during former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s border openings in 2015-2016 became eligible for naturalization in 2024, approximately 8-9 years after their arrival — and for most, after they had successfully integrated.

“[Syrians] have high intentions to integrate and stay … there are studies comparing return intentions before and after the fall [of Assad], and they find that the share of people who want to go back slightly increased, but a large and overwhelming majority wants to stay for the foreseeable future in Germany,” said Jonas Wiedner, a German sociologist who studies social stratification and integration issues faced by immigrants.  “Germany has invested billions of euros in integrating, training, and schooling people from Syria.”

German politicians remain divided on the topic of repatriation. And Syrians, many of whom have lived in Germany for years but have yet to receive their citizenship, remain in judicial limbo. Many are fearful that rightward cultural shifts will translate to policy ones. In many ways, those shifts have already been realized.

Wiedner noted that while there is some credence to the claim that Germany’s rightward, anti-immigrant shift is a part of a broader shift observable in many Western countries today, Germany stands in a particularly unique historical position. Their open-border policy and relationship to a large number of Syrian refugees specifically have played significantly “into the hands of the far right.”

“The … welcoming culture is no longer the dominant force in German political opinion,” he said. “There’s a large majority of people who want to see migration limited, and also want to see foreigners, particularly refugees, reduced in Germany.” 

Kristin Brinker, the Chair of the Berlin division of the AfD and member of the Berlin House of Representatives, agrees that ‘welcoming culture’ no longer exists. But she doesn’t see this as a problem. 

“If the war in a country has stopped, then the migrants have to go back,” said Kristin Brinker, the Chair of the Berlin division of the AfD and member of the Berlin House of Representatives. Tidily dressed and groomed, she gave a concerned frown at the end of each sentence, occasionally slipping German conjunctions in place of English ones. 

Brinker — who self-identifies with a more moderate wing of the AfD — sounded little like her impassioned colleagues, some of whom emblazon ‘Make Europe Great Again’ slogans and orate passionately in social media-viral speeches. The AfD party’s leader, Alice Wiedel, aroused controversy after declaring that “burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state.” Brinker’s demeanor was laughably tranquil in comparison.

“There are a lot of Syrians here. They live in our social system. They are young men, and they can work, go home, and rebuild their country,” Brinker said, fixing her hair. “And that’s an important message for us.”

*** 

I’ve been sitting in an empty Zoom conference for 15 minutes when a pixelated apparition of Stephan Mayer’s round, doughy face emerges from the void. The flickering lights of German apartment buildings flash by in his car window. He mutters a sentence in German — I respond that I can only understand English. “Make it quick,” he says. “I only have a few minutes.”

Mayer, who has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2002, stepped down from his role as Secretary-General of Germany’s CSU party in early 2022 after making death threats to a journalist for reporting on his illegitimate child. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mayer served as the Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior from 2018 to 2021. Now, he is a ‘Spokesperson for Sports’ of the CDU/CSU party. As part of his former Parliamentary State Secretary position, however, Mayer said that determining the CDU/CSU’s stance on migration policy was one of the key aspects of his job.

“I followed the discussions about migration, and especially illegal migration, very intensively within the last decade,” he said. “I am deeply opposing the theory that there [has been] a shift in [Germany’s] Willkommenskultur [welcoming culture].”

Critical to the argument for Syrian repatriation — a policy Mayer remains a strong proponent of — is the notion that a post-Assad Syria is safe for return. “Fortunately, we now have quite [a] stable government in Syria,” Mayer said. “I just had a briefing with the Federal [Foreign Office], and they are very confident that the al-Sharaa government is stabilizing.” Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, a former rebel commander and member of al-Qaeda, assumed Syrian presidency in January of 2025. The meeting presumably included Johann Wadepuhl, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who opposed Syrian repatriation after making contentious comments about Syria’s safety after the fall of Assad.

But if Syria is truly safe for return as Mayer and some of his CDU colleagues are proposing, there seem to be other strong incentives keeping return rates at bay.

[TK Potential moamadani/al-zoabi interview inclusion on how rents in damascus are similar to rents in major american cities; more data on Syria’s livability]

In the early 1990s, the Yugoslav Wars — a series of ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies in the Balkan region that lasted over 10 years —  sparked a major refugee and humanitarian crisis in Europe. Generous estimates put the number of refugees at nearly 1 million. Germany received a large number of refugees — around 700,000. Most, according to Wiedner, were repatriated after three to four years in Germany.

“So there is precedent that large repatriations can work,” he said. “But of course, now the Syrians have been here for more than 10 years. That’s a different story.” 

Only now is Germany’s billions of euros in migrant integration investments — integration training, schooling, and education — bearing economic returns. “More and more people are in the labor market [and are] contributing to the social security system. To send people back now, after all of these investments, really seems unwise,” Wiedner added. 

[TK on doctors / syrians taking up high skill positions that would be empty otherwise; quote on brinker saying even the doctors should leave so that they can ‘help rebuild’]

***

There’s an implied agency in the word ‘repatriation’. Unlike ‘deportation’, which often involves an involuntary removal and a cited violation of immigration law, ‘repatriation’ does not indicate any kind of legal violation and, in some cases, presupposes a voluntary return. But not all repatriations are voluntary, and not all involuntary repatriations involve a legal violation. 

A repatriation, then, can become a practical equivalent to a deportation without legal basis.

Like the word ‘repatriation,’ shifts in Germany’s migration sentiment have been presented in feigned platitudes. Some, like Brinker, cite Germany’s investment in Syria’s reconstruction: their homeland calls for the return of their young and talented. Others like Mayer cite a dubiously defined ‘safety’: of course Germany is a welcoming place for immigrants! But if ‘home’ is a great place to be in, why should they have to be here at all? 

To some, the platitudes of German migration politics seem to hide something more sinister: a fundamental misunderstanding of life as a Syrian migrant in Germany. At the very least, that’s how Tareq Alaows saw it in 2021, when he realized he could be the missing voice of authenticity in the German government from a refugee perspective.

“I realized, even as a refugee who came to Germany in 2015, my perspective, my voice, was missing in the political debates about refugees. Not just my individual perspective, but overall,” he said. “The perspective of affected people in politics, and that’s why I decided to run for the Bundestag in 2021, to represent exactly this perspective of the people in the Bundestag during political decision-making.” 

Alaows expected backlash. As the first Syrian refugee to ever attempt candidacy for the Bundestag and also as a member of the left-leaning Green Party, he knew that anti-refugee and racist social media posts were something he’d have to endure.

“The hostility [ranged] from people who said that as a Syrian, I could seek protection in Germany, but I shouldn’t run for a political position … [to] people saying that they would look for me and, if they found me, would take me back to Syria to Assad so he could kill me as a political opponent.”

But what he didn’t expect was threats to his family members and a physical altercation that would leave him fearing for his safety. One night on a Berlin subway ride, Alaows was accosted by a man who screamed at his face for nearly a minute straight. His family members also began receiving death threats initially limited to his own inboxes — and that was when he decided to retract his candidacy.

Alaows thinks that this anti-immigrant rhetoric that drove his candidacy to withdrawal, while pronounced after the fall of Assad, was a phenomenon already in the making.  “The debate about refugees shifted from being about ‘asylum seekers’ to so-called ‘illegal migrants’ in recent years. And this didn’t just refer to refugees from Syria, but to all refugees coming to Germany,” he said.

It’s unmistakable, Alaows thinks, that this phenomenon was also one adopted by the German moderates. “I noticed that certain statements by AfD politicians in 2015, like ‘we shoot people at the border’ or ‘we must push people back with force at the German borders’, [were limited] within far-right circles,” he said. “But over time, it gradually became more socially acceptable and was even adopted by democratic parties.”

***

When I had asked Stephan Mayer whether he believed that the CDU/CSU’s rightward policy shifts on migration were influenced by an attempt to appeal to conservative voters, he’d scoffed.

“That’s absolutely not true … I just said that we are hosting 1 million Syrian refugees, and now, the civil war has fortunately ended. We [gave them] residence allowances, but only for a certain time, for the time of the Civil War … and now the war has ended. [What] does that have anything in common with regaining conservative votes?” he said.

“It’s a natural development,” he added.

Alaows would agree with him. That is, agree with his final statement: that what’s happening to Syrians in Germany today in a post-Assad world is merely an extension of an alarming development of anti-immigrant sentiment that’s been growing in potency for years. 

“Even before the fall of the Assad regime, the narratives have changed,” he said. “There were already efforts to deport people to Syria. [Even] while Assad was still in power.”

[feeling iffy about the ending]

The night the news broke that Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s longtime dictator, had fallen, Hesham Moamadani felt his world tilt. On the desk beside him lay his freshly minted German passport, issued only days earlier, its polished red cover catching the light of the TV. Nearly a decade had passed since he’d crossed into Germany’s borders with nothing but the clothes on his back, fleeing Assad’s dictatorial regime and indiscriminate violence. That day, he sat in his Berlin apartment with a document that confirmed his place, only for the very reason he’d fled to flicker out into the oblivion of the German evening news. A mix of conflicting emotions—joy, overwhelm, and disbelief—washed over him, soon followed by anxiety for his other Syrian friends who still lacked passports.

Moamadani was one of nearly 300,000 people who were granted German citizenship in 2024, a record for the nation. A large number of Syrian refugees who arrived during former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s border openings in 2015-2016 became eligible for naturalization that year, and Moamadani was one of them. 

What most didn’t anticipate, though, was that the dreaded Assad regime would collapse abruptly, mobilizing a stream of disputes within the German government on whether or not to repatriate Syrian nationals back to their home country. Particularly inflamed by the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the West, German politicians remain divided; and Syrians, many of whom have lived in Germany for years but are yet to receive their citizenship, remain in judicial limbo, with many fearful that the regime’s fall continues to serve.

“The … welcoming culture is no longer the dominant force in German political opinion,” said Jonas Wiedner, a German sociologist who studies social stratification and integration issues faced by immigrants in Germany. “There’s a large majority of people who want to see migration limited, and also want to see foreigners, particularly refugees, reduced in Germany.” 

While there’s credence to the claim that Germany’s rightward, anti-immigrant shift is a part of a broader shift observable in many Western countries today, Wiedner noted that Germany stands in a particularly unique position. With their open-border policy history and relationship to Syrian refugees specifically, Wiedner believes that the border policies from 2015 played significantly “into the hands of the far right.”

But the far right is no longer the only demographic embracing anti-immigrant policy in Germany. The AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland), or Germany’s populist far-right party, gained significant voter traction after embracing mass deportation policies. Even the traditional center-right political powerhouse, the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union), whose members hold the largest share of seats in the German Bundestag, has begun ceding to the anti-immigration narrative, too.

After a visit to Damascus, Syria, earlier this month, Germany’s Foreign Minister and CDU member Johann Wadephul said in a statement to German news network Deutsche Welle that “hardly anyone can live here [in Syria] with dignity.” During a meeting in parliament, Wadephul allegedly made a remark that said today’s “Syria looked worse than postwar Germany.” 

Wadephul’s statements irked other high-ranking German politicians in the CDU/CSU party, drawing scrutiny from many of his more conservative colleagues. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose pointed remarks appeared to address Wadepuhl indirectly, noted that “there is no longer any reason for [Syrian] asylum in Germany, and therefore, [Germany] can begin repatriations.” 

For now, voluntary repatriation and deportations of Syrians with criminal records remain at the forefront of the CDU’s policies. But only 0.1% of Germany’s Syrians have voluntarily returned to their homeland a year after Assad’s fall. Those like Moamadani know that they are lucky. But to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians under more precarious circumstances — such as those with temporary residence permits or a subsidiary protection status — small shifts can feel potentially life-altering.

*** 

I’ve been sitting in an empty Zoom conference for 15 minutes when a pixelated apparition of Stephan Mayer’s round, doughy face emerges from the void. The flickering lights of German apartment buildings flash by in his car window. He mutters a sentence in German — I respond that I can only understand English. “ Make it quick,” he says. “I only have a few minutes.”

Mayer, who has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2002, stepped down from his role as Secretary-General of Germany’s CSU party in early 2022 after making death threats to a journalist for reporting on his illegitimate child. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mayer served as the Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior from 2018 to 2021. Now, he is a ‘Spokesperson for Sports’ of the CDU/CSU party. As part of his former Parliamentary State Secretary position, however, Mayer said that determining the CDU/CSU’s stance on migration policy was one of the key aspects of his job.

“I followed the discussions about migration, and especially illegal migration, very intensively within the last decade,” he said. “I am deeply opposing the theory that there [has been] a shift in [Germany’s] Willkommenskultur.”

Critical to the argument for Syrian repatriation — a policy Mayer remains a strong proponent of — is the notion that a post-Assad Syria is safe for return. “Fortunately, we now have quite [a] stable government in Syria,” Mayer said. “I just had a briefing with the Federal [Foreign Office], and they are very confident that the al-Sharaa government is stabilizing.” The meeting presumably included Johann Wadepuhl, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who opposed Syrian repatriation after making contentious comments about Syria’s safety after the fall of Assad.

But if Syria is truly safe for return as Mayer and some of his colleagues propose, there seem to be other strong incentives keeping return rates at bay.

In the early 1990s, the Yugoslav Wars — a series of ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies in the Balkan region that lasted over 10 years —  sparked a major refugee and humanitarian crisis in Europe. Generous estimates put the number of refugees at nearly 1 million. Germany received a large number of refugees — around 700,000.

[TK: more on Germany’s successful repatriation of refugees after Yugoslav Wars; But Syrians have been here for 10 years (as opposed to 3-4) and Germany has invested billions of Euros into their integration. In Wiedner’s words, only now is that ‘investment bearing fruit’ — Syrians have stable jobs, speak fluent German, many of them have graduated from German institutions, etc…]

10 years ago, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees, sparking the genesis of the nation’s ‘Wilkommenskulture’ — welcoming culture. After Assad’s fall, the rise of the center-right, and escalating anti-immigrant sentiment, Germany’s politicians are increasingly divided on the topic of Syrian repatriation.

Everything happened all at once. 

Hesham Moamadani’s German passport, freshly minted just a few days prior, was glistening on his desk. Moamadani was anxiously gnawing on his fingernails. Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator, had fallen. Moamadani once believed the day would never arrive. And yet it did, the news landing ever so mundanely on his screen as if making a mockery out of the beads of sweat dripping from his forehead, never mind Berlin’s subzero December freeze. 

Moamadani was one of nearly 300,000 people who were granted German citizenship in 2024, a record for the nation. A large number of Syrian refugees who arrived during former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s border openings in 2015-2016 became eligible for naturalization that year; Moamadani was one of them. What most didn’t anticipate was that the dreaded Assad regime would collapse abruptly, mobilizing a stream of disputes within the German government on whether or not to repatriate Syrian nationals back to their home country. Particularly inflamed by the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the West, German politicians remain divided. And Syrians, many of whom have lived in Germany for years but are yet to receive their citizenship, remain in judicial limbo.

“Hardly anyone can live here with dignity,” Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in a statement to German news network Deutsche Welle after a visit to Damascus, Syria, earlier this month. During a meeting in parliament, Wadephul allegedly made a remark that said today’s “Syria looked worse than postwar Germany.” A member of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Wadephul’s statements drew the attention of high-ranking German politicians and drew scrutiny from more conservative party counterparts. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose pointed remarks appeared to indirectly address Wadephul, noted that “there is no longer any reason for [Syrian] asylum in Germany, and therefore, [Germany] can begin repatriations.” 

The rightward shift in mainstream German politics reflects a larger wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that has taken hold of the country in recent years. While for now, voluntary repatriation and deportations of Syrians with criminal records remain at the forefront of the CDU’s policies, only 0.1% of Germany’s Syrians have voluntarily returned to their homeland a year after Assad’s fall. Those like Moamadani know that they are lucky. But for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians in more precarious circumstances — such as those with temporary residence permits or a subsidiary protection status — small political shifts can feel life-altering.

The Aleppo and Jane Doe Ponytail piece starts off similarly: in the midst of an active scene that sucks the reader into a moment of suspense. “If I’m thinking in terms of story, thinking cinematically and how to lure the reader, it was one of the very first things that struck me: this poor woman falling,” author Dan Barry said for the GIJN article. Barry succeeds: á lá true crime podcast episode, we are drawn into the climactic scene of the story before its context is even introduced. The story slowly unfolds, revealing not only the true nature of Song Yang’s downfall but the story of her life, family, and the thriving underground sex industry, primarily populated by Flushing’s low-income immigrant women.

The Aleppo story runs in the same vein of suspense in the introduction, but its effects are slightly different, and in my opinion, less effective. We begin with the story of Abu Sami, whose sedentary life has miraculously spared him from witnessing the changes the city went through. Only after being escorted out by rebel soldiers did he see the light of sun for the first time in four and a half years. The scene is effective and interesting, but remains a loose end for the majority of the piece. The article then delves into the sociopolitical complexities of the region and attempts to piece together life in Aleppo before and after its destruction. The piece felt less effective in that it was trying to accomplish too much, all at once. It tries to elaborate on every factor that led to Aleppo’s demise and traces far too many groups, events, and individuals. I enjoyed how the author included anecdotes of his own experiences. But he was asking the reader to follow a lot of information, and sometimes that information felt disjointed. For example, for a few grafs, the author sums up reasons that many Syrians’ abhorrence against rebel groups in spite of their dislike for the Assad regime — they looted many civillians and their homes. Then the author introduces us to Marrache and Marie-Michelle, whose house, once beautiful, was destroyed by conflict and looting. Then the author reminisces an Aleppo from before; then suddenly we are talking about the conflict between urban wealth and rural poverty. There were too many people, too many events, too many groups, to keep track of. I kept finding myself reading and rereading grafs because I would lose his train or thought or be unable to connect one graf from another.

Perhaps its unfair for me to expect that the a piece on the conflict-hidden history of one city will rival the structural clarity of a piece centered on the death of one woman, but I do think the Jane Doe Ponytail piece did what the Aleppo piece didn’t: it didn’t leave any loose ends. The information that the authors shared with us made sense in the grand scheme of the story. We don’t get back to the story of Abu Sami, the professor who “shut himself off from the war inside his home,” until the very final few grafs of the Aleppo story. The first and climactic scene of the Jane Doe Ponytail story is entirely explained by the end of the article. The death of this woman means so, so much more to the reader by the end of the story than it did in the beginning. I do think it’s very difficult to keep the reader interested in any longform piece, and I do think the scenes that the authors chose for their respective pieces sufficiently drew me in, at least in the beginning. But I think that crumbs that I give to my reader should lead to a trail that they can follow, not just more crumbs atop another. It’s easy to bombard the reader with information; it’s a bit harder to ensure they can make sense out of all of it.

My final piece will be about Germany’s adherence to the legal principle of ‘universality’ and the Syrian community’s changing climate of faith in German legal institutions after the fall of Assad in Syria. I want to cover the Trial on the Siege of Yarmouk, which was what I was writing about initially and is a centerpiece to the discussion on an ongoing universal jurisdiction case, but I want to write more generally about the history of universal jurisdiction in Germany, how it has impacted the Syrian migrant community, what German justice systems mean to Syrians after repatriation efforts enacted by the government, etc.

What does a system like universal jurisdiction mean to Syrians in a nation increasingly plagued by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment? What does it mean when so many of them, after countless years of living in German society, still haven’t obtained their German citizenship? What does it mean when both universal jurisdiction and asylum are both rooted in a legal philosophy of universality that Germany claims to stand for, but only the former is being actively embraced? I would like to weave the stories of Syrian-Germans, lawyers, and experts in universal jurisdiction to craft my final piece. I would ideally like to extend/incorporate the profile of Hesham Moamadani in the final feature — Moamadani was a Syrian refugee, but recently gained his German citizenship and can enjoy its benefits. How has his experience differed from his friends, who are Syrian but have not yet obtained citizenship? I also want to incorporate my interview with Syrian lawyer Anwar Bunni, who, even after experiencing the horrors of Assad’s government, remained robustly faithful to the German legal system, as well as my interview with Berit, who spoke with me about anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany and EU law.

Reading John McPhee’s piece on structure then Cece’s response affirmed my initial reaction to McPhee’s piece. As someone who writes frequently and and in great volume, structure has always been my best friend. But I think that journalistic writing specifically often benefits from a lack of structure, or at the very least, the lack of an anticipation for structure. A story should build itself based on the evidence provided — one shouldn’t ‘decide’ on a story before seeking out the sources to support it. This is difficult, because by the time I’m interviewing my subjects, I usually have a vague idea on what my final story will look like, and therefore seek out subjects knowing that they would play a certain role in my story. Which isn’t to say that many of the interviews I conduct go exactly as anticipated — it’s often quite the opposite. But I wonder if McPhee’s understanding of effective structure, like Cece outlined, is only achievable when structure is already presumed before the reporting process begins and merely becomes more visible after the writing process starts. I also disagree with McPhee in that ‘good structure’ is something that you can learn by reading about structure. I think it’s a muscle you train that gets better at recognizing more effective structures over others — the best way to learn good structure, I think, is to read pieces with good structure, not read about good structure itself. Also, while I was not a huge fan of McPhee’s prose (which consisted mostly of random, abrupt anecdotes in his time as a writer,) I did appreciate how much emphasis he placed on the importance of the visual. While the bigger question of whether structure is anticipated/planned afterwards remains unanswered for me, I do believe that organizing your story visually is significantly more helpful than, say, organizing it through text. Flashcards, doodles, and drawings have served me very well in organizing some of my longer works. I enjoyed Rosenthal’s piece for this reason: it visually summarizes some common formats that great writers have used to format their stories. I especially liked the radiolab drawing, which I think is how a lot of great investigative podcasts are structured: starting small then expanding into something much bigger than itself. I thought the New York Times piece we read on Skalnik embodied this structure well — starting off with a smaller case that initially did not seem related to the key character of the piece, we eventually expand into the subject himself, and the different cases he influenced the rulings for. Of course, knowing these drawings to heart alone will not produce a good story — the core needs to support the flesh. But once you’ve developed a moderately strong writerly muscle, I think they can be more than helpful.

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.”

I frequently grapple with the tension between the limitations of a journalist’s role and the narrative authority that they are given. On one hand, being a journalist often means you are a visitor to the topic or community you are writing about. Even if I were to traverse the entirety of the Darien Gap myself, for example — exhaustion, food insecurity, and threats to violence included — to report on the stories of the migrants fleeing their home countries, that does not mean that I faced the same kind of political or economic violence that drove me to the desperation of a life-threatening escape, nor does it mean that I will understand the implications of a life afterwards. At the same time, ‘good journalism’ often seems defined by a kind of adjacency to authenticity. The ‘closer’ you are to portraying the reality of the lives you depict, the ‘better’ journalist you are. But any kind of journalist who claims ‘true’ authenticity, I think, is embellishing: there is only so much you can understand about something you are clearly not.

I think, though, that attempting to understand a life you will always be a stranger to is a valuable cause, not only because it provides the groundwork for good journalism, but because that is the very precondition of a healthy society that appears to be lacking in today’s political atmosphere. Take Caitlin Dickerson’s What I Saw in the Darien Gap: her embedded journalism brings her to multiple families undertaking the dangerous trek. From the relatively temporary and fragmentary encounters, Dickerson creates a patchwork for a whole. She puts into contrast the stories of these individuals with the wider political context of changing immigration policies in the Americas. I think Dickerson is well aware that she could never portray the full realities of the countless lives that are featured in her story. But her visceral descriptions and observations on the trail are only made available through her presence, and they build the contrast between the sterile bureaucracy that treat migrants as statistics and the harrowing stories of the migrants themselves. 

Madeleine Baran’s In the Dark Season 3 shows, though, that geographically embedded journalism is not an imperative (although, to some degree, I think it’s enabled by the fact that Baran’s work is primarily investigative and based on the past as opposed to Dickerson’s piece, which was more narrative and present). Baran approaches the Haditha massacres with a level of journalistic rigor that I didn’t think was humanly possible — thousands of FOIAs, hundreds of interviews, scouring the darkest and ugliest corners of the internet over the course of 4 years. While Baran does travel to Haditha for the project, the bulk of her research rests on interviews and data from the U.S. I would hesitate to say that Baran’s work is not a form of embedded journalism — Baran puts herself directly in front of the primary actors of the Haditha incident, visiting the homes of the marines, enduring harassment, etc. Which is to say, I think embedded journalism in the age of social media and OSINT can look very different from what embedded journalism looked like 10, 20 years ago.

Never did I think I could learn so much about the intricacies of Egyptian society and culture through the story of one of its garbage collectors. Sayyid Ahmed’s story in Tales of the Trash starts off with an amalgamation of unassuming interactions between him and journalist Peter Hessler. Each week, trash collector (or ‘zabaleen’) Sayyid makes visits to Hessler’s home, dissipating his trash from existence from the fire escape beside his front door before the break of dawn.

Sayyid is illustrated as an eccentric and illiterate middle-aged man existing in one of the most fascinating informal city infrastructures I’ve ever encountered. As an uncontracted garbage collector, Sayyid is not paid by any government or private organization; he operates mainly on tips. And yet, he brings in more than $500USD monthly to his family, more than twice the average monthly earnings in Cairo. While his illiteracy forces him to ask his neighbors to read out messages from his wife or labels on counterfeit sex drugs (Sayyid’s striking fixation on women and sex, as the piece offers a deep dive into, reveals a swath of insights on Egyptian culture), Sayyid’s attunement to his physical presentation and his surroundings is apparent. He dresses very poorly, for example, because he knows that residents are more likely to tip the more destitute he appears. In a kind of strange semblance to OSINT, Sayyid uses the trash he collects from residents to make inferences about their lives: the regular appearance of two syringes a day in one resident’s home, for example, implied that he had diabetes; discarded bank letters and pornographic magazines from an elderly sex-crazed diplomat revealed his wealth and sexual preferences in detail.

I was fascinated by how Hessler structured the story in such a way that Sayyid’s story bridged to larger insights about Egyptian culture and history. The zabaleen system, for example, emerged from a wave of migration of Copic Christians in the 30s who sold pork and became contracted waste recyclers. In the late 2000s, however, political unrest destabilized the system, in part contributing to the excess of trash that became highly visible in the city. Hessler in many ways accomplished what I want to do in my own profile, situating the story of one man’s life in the wider context of the political, historical, and social shfits that shaped the personal lives of its residents. In ephemeral bursts of scenes and conversations he has with Sayyid, Hessler wove together a story not just of one person but an entire nation. I would love to combine this kind of ‘interwoven’ storytelling with the striking visuality and description used in Deb’s piece. Each scene was described with so much life and color — her writing allowed me to vividly see the image of the dance floor or the faces of the women. The almost mystical description of the scene sharply contrasted with the dark destitution faced by the women and children, forced into prostitution to support themselves and their family. With the combination of vivid storytelling and politico-historical contextualization, I hope to write about Hesham’s story of escape from the Syrian war with vivid and honest detail.

By Miriam Waldvogel

10/14/25

My first pro-Palestine protest in Berlin was even smaller than the puny demonstrations I’ve seen at Princeton.

I decided on a whim with Alex, Raphi, and Siyeon to forgo most of the German Historical Museum visit in favor of a protest in Urbanhafen, which we had seen advertised online. After seeing videos of huge pro-Palestine protests in Berlin over the weekend, we all assumed it would be standard fare: a big crowd of people, keffiyehs and flags, chants. But what we found was not at all expected.

It was so small we almost missed it: half a dozen people on the bank of the Landwehr Kanal standing around inflatable boats. They would have looked like everyday boaters except for their keffiyehs and a sign or two propped up against a tree. Lilith Kocharyan, one of the organizers, told us that they were going to paddle down the canal in solidarity with the various flotillas that have attempted to bring aid to Gaza in the past couple weeks.

Lilith describes herself as an “unapologetically feminist lgbtq ally environmentalist berlin-addict” in her Facebook bio. She had organized around Armenian communities in Berlin, running a tech company that helped Armenia-based startups break into the German market, ranging from UI/UX to computer vision to blockchain platforms. Lilith’s activism pivoted to Palestine after Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

Today, there were about a half dozen protesters, with four boats and signs. And, it turns out, something had already gone wrong: the person who was supposed to bring the pumps hadn’t showed.

We ambled away for a few minutes, and by the time we came back they had sprung into action, pumping up the boats and affixing their banners and signs to their watercrafts’ fronts and backs. I noticed a police boat parked on the other side of the canal, and soon after a smaller inflatable raft with three police officers drifted by. We wondered if the activists were taking a risk by boating down the canal. But Lilith assured us that, in fact, the water police in Berlin were quite friendly and willing to let them be.

As we talked with Lilith and the other protesters, I was surprised by the cultural and regulatory differences with demonstrations in the U.S. In Germany, it’s illegal to say “from the river to the sea” because it was ruled by a court that the phrase calls for the erasure of Israel. One of the protesters had previously been arrested for saying something like “from all the rivers to all the seas,” Lilith told us.

The police were surprisingly relaxed. If you tried the equivalent in the U.S., it’s likely they would immediately demand your boating license and then make it a huge problem when you didn’t comply, because all you wanted to do was float a small rubber boat down a river.