My father had not set foot in Syria since he was nineteen years old. 

Aged 76, Ahmed Al-Zeer stepped off a plane at Damascus airport on a February afternoon—the sun splashing over his face, music ringing in the air, and a homeland he had held in his heart for over five decades unfolding before him.

He had left as a hopeful young man in 1975, bound for Madinah to study Shariah law. But while he was abroad, the ground shifted beneath him. Hafez al-Assad’s regime passed Law 49—a ruthless decree sentencing anyone affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood to death. Overnight, home became a place he could no longer return to. What began as a journey for knowledge turned into an unplanned exile.

Other political groups were swiftly dismantled too, but the Brotherhood a non-violent political movement, with deep roots and wide reach, posed the greatest ideological threat to the regime. In response to an uprising by a faction in 1981, the Baathist regime unleashed a brutal campaign, silencing dissent with mass arrests, massacres, and even assassinations abroad. Syria was being stripped clean of opposition—systematically, mercilessly.

After marrying my mother in Syria, my father was able to continue his studies in the UK, that’s also where me and my five siblings were born and where he settled and found work as a teacher - hoping he would return to his beloved Syria soon.

When he left, he was a young man, caught in the grip of a regime that seemed unshakeable. Now, five decades later, he returned an old man, his beard silvered, his gait slowed—astonished to find the unthinkable had happened: the Assad regime was gone.

Music and strangers

At the arrival gate, the beat of duf drums filled the space. Traditional musicians clustered around playing songs of welcome, and strangers were embracing one another like long-lost kin. This was not the Syria he had left—but it was Syria nonetheless. There was grief in his eyes, yes, but also joy. A stunned, quiet joy. He whispered, almost to himself, “Syria is beautiful.”

My cousin was meant to be picking us up from inside the terminal, but in our exhaustion, we stepped outside too soon—and couldn’t get back in. My father, determined, insisted on re-entering through the main gate, while I waited with our suitcases until I saw them at a distance—relieved, amused, reunited.

We drove in silence, breathing in the land. Through scarred towns and resilient orchards, along dusty highways and past bombed-out hotels, we journeyed to Baniyas, the small coastal town that had once been my father’s childhood home. A four-hour drive. A fifty-year journey home. Fifty years.

What remained of his family was just his younger brother and sister—his childhood companions. They were grey now and stooped, the war and hunger had aged them, but their eyes lit up like fireflies when they saw him.

The reunion felt like a dream, like watching a film in slow motion. When he stepped into his sister’s home, they embraced, then pulled back to look at each other, then embraced again. There were no tears or dramatic outbursts as I had expected. Instead they sat on my aunt’s sofa and began chatting, like old friends picking up where they left off.

Gathered in a cold, electricity-starved house, we were wrapped not in central heating but in laughter, coffee, and stories that spanned decades.

My father spoke of their early mornings—his father tending the land, his mother baking bread and singing. He recalled the big fig tree that shaded them in summer, the neighbour who strolled in without knocking to make their morning coffee. Tales I’d never heard before, as though a lifetime of memories had suddenly been unburied. He remembered it all—clearly, vividly, as though he had left just yesterday.

But his little town had changed.

Where once there were a hundred homes and lush green fields—with soil so fertile his father could grow anything from sweet potatoes to peanuts to olives—now there were only concrete buildings and high-rise flats, built to accommodate a growing population.

He scanned the streets for familiar landmarks, searching the present for ghosts of the past. Where was the old shop? The pomegranate tree? The patch of land where they played football? I saw it in his eyes—the war between the delight of return and the mourning of all that had been lost.

Still, he was content. At peace. We sat by the sea, drinking misk-scented coffee as children ran along the beach and cousins shared stories, both old and new. His laughter, so rare and reserved back home, flowed freely here. He seemed—if only for a moment—whole again.

A land remembered

And then, like a quiet tide rising beneath the personal, came the weight of the political.

Because this wasn’t just a family reunion. This was history breaking open.

On December 8, Syria shocked the world. A swift and decisive rebel offensive swept through Aleppo, Homs, and finally Damascus, toppling a regime that had ruled through brutality and fear for over fifty years. The Assads—first the father, then the son—had held Syria in an unrelenting grip since 1971. The cost was immense: mass incarceration, executions, suppression, and the forced displacement of millions.

My father, a teacher, had always hoped to return. Like so many others in the diaspora—engineers, shopkeepers, poets, mothers—he had clung to the hope that one day Syria would be free, and that he could walk its soil without fear. But the years passed, and the dream became a whisper, buried beneath the weight of exile.

Until now.

It was as if a locked gate, long sealed shut and buried under rubble, had suddenly swung open. And from every corner of the globe, Syrians began to come home—some old and frail, some with children and grandchildren in tow. They rummaged through drawers for expired passports, traced memories through photo albums, and followed the call of a land that had lived in their hearts, even when the world had stopped speaking its name.

But returning is not simple.

For many, the Syria they return to is not the one they left. Entire towns are gone. Friends are dead. Entire generations grew up in exile like myself and my siblings, disconnected from the soil their parents were born on. And while the regime may have fallen, the scars it left behind are raw and gaping.

Yet, there is something miraculous in the act of return. Something profoundly healing. Even amid ruins and rubble, even when buildings are smaller than remembered and trees have vanished, the scent of jasmine and the rhythm of Arabic spoken in every corner of a town can bring a soul back to life.

We visited his family home. He stepped through the open gates, and crossed the courtyard, somewhat confused by the changes. “Why is it so much smaller?” he asks his brother, who laughed and replied, “Because we are so much bigger’.

Word of his return spread. Old acquaintances drop by. Later, back at my aunt’s house, I watched my father sit under the lemon tree in her garden, nursing a cup of steaming coffee. It struck me—this wasn’t just his return. It was the return of hope, of memory, of possibility.

He looked out across the yard, to the spot where he once played cards as a teenager. “Fifty years,” he said softly, “and I still remember where the olive tree stood.”

Fifty years. And still, he came back to find the home that dictatorship tried to erase, standing firm. 

Now, Syria stands at the brink of something new. No one knows what comes next. The road ahead will be difficult, and healing takes time. But the dream has returned. The door is open.

And my father has walked through it.