The other members of Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah’s (General Supervisor of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center) delegation and I arrived in Damascus at eight o’clock in the morning last Sunday. We were there for the inauguration of several ambitious humanitarian, medical, educational, and development projects in Syria.
I had never dreamed that there would come a day when I would see Damascus again; I had lost hope that the Syria we love would return. However, it has returned, despite all the conspiracies of local and foreign forces, and it will keep returning.
Upon leaving the VIP lounge, the media team accompanying the delegation was given a tour of some of the areas in the Damascus countryside that had been turned into scorched earth. Without thinking, I said to my colleagues in the car: “A foreign occupation force would not have done to Syria what Bashar al-Assad has done.”
Destroyed buildings and places of worship were everywhere, as were the shadows of the dead and echoes of the cries of the oppressed. Today, my advice to the Syrian state is to avoid rushing the reconstruction of these areas. This work should not begin for at least another five years or more, as they should continue to attest to the crimes of the regime and the hardship endured by the Syrian people.
Visitors must see what happened to Syria, what the former regime and its criminal partners did to it. Syrians returning from abroad and foreigners must be reminded that Syria’s present is born of real suffering.
We then headed to the Four Seasons Hotel for the inauguration ceremony of the Saudi projects. We could see what had befallen Damascus on the way, since the revolution and perhaps even before. I say this having visited Syria back in 2009 and 2010 as part of the media delegation accompanying the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, may God have mercy on his soul.
From the airport to the hotel, you see circles of violence, crime, and impoverishment. I call them circles because the closer you get to Umayyad Square and Mount Qasioun, the narrower these circles of poverty and destruction become, a tangible reflection of Assad’s notion of “useful Syria.”
The closer you get to Assad’s strongholds, the starker the contrast between the regions of Syria that he had ravaged and those that he shielded with Iranian, Hezbollah, and others’ support. Normal Damascus lies in ruins, while Assad’s enclave amounts to a stark embodiment of the devastation wrought by Baathist corruption and ideology, of the legacy of both father and son.
The warmth with which Syrians received our visiting delegation, as our cars drove through their neighborhoods, was moving. As soon as we stepped into the hotel lobby, it felt as though we had been facing Arab and international television broadcasts of the revolution years. The same voices and faces that had been seen on television in capitals across the globe were now gathered in a single hall. I saw people filled with hope and others seizing the moment.
Figures from across the Arab region and the world filled the lobby, and it literally felt like we had been watching multiple television screens at once, all of them with familiar faces. The question everyone kept asking me was the same: “Is Saudi Arabia with us? Is this a strategic position?”
My answer was simple: What I have seen and learned, merely through the projects of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center in Syria, is enough to say that this relationship is being founded on partnership and investment. Our strategic relationship is founded not on words but deeds.
At the end of this brief visit, my dear colleague Ms. Alia Mansour asked me: “What will you write now?” I told her: “I saw destruction in the buildings of Damascus and construction in the faces of its people.” She replied, “This is a tweet you should expand into an article.” Here, I have done just that, and I have more to say.
