Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the sources.

One day in 2011, Rabia was out playing soccer with her friends on the streets of Latakia, Syria, when she heard multiple rounds of gunshots. Her eldest brother, Ibrahim, had just gone out to a protest against the Bashar al-Assad regime, and was not picking up the frenzied calls of their parents. His family soon found out that he had been shot in the leg by a sniper. “That was the last time I played with my friends,” Rabia told me. 

Afraid that government forces would continue to target him, Rabia’s family sent Ibrahim to New York City to live with his brother and uncle. It wasn’t much later when they watched him on TV, continuing to protest against Assad from his new home in America, still in crutches recovering from his gunshot wound. Rabia’s family knew then they were not safe in Syria under a regime that was known to imprison, torture, and kill dissidents and their family members. They packed up all of their stuff and joined Ibrahim in New York. 

“I’m pretty sure everybody who packed their stuff and left at the beginning of the revolution thought, I’m gonna come back in two, three months,” Rabia said. “Because that’s what we thought.” Months turned into years. Rabia would live with Ibrahim, her middle brother, and parents in a one-bedroom apartment on 95th Street in Bay Ridge for the next decade, before settling in Staten Island, where she now lives with her mother. 

Though in Bay Ridge Rabia found a vibrant Arab community, nothing ever matched the warmth of the people in her hometown of Latakia, the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea, or time-slowing moments she shared with her family in her childhood home. But going back was never a possibility—until the end of 2024, when the Bashar al-Assad regime was toppled. When Rabia—who had previously joined protests across the United States, singing the anthem of the revolution “Yalla Erhal ya Bashar” (“Come On Bashar, Leave”) in front of the United Nations and the White House—heard the news of Assad’s fall, she said it was the happiest day of her life. In January 2026, a little over a year later, Rabia visited Syria for the first time since leaving, and her future became rich with possibility. 

Rabia is just one of countless Syrians across the world for whom the dream of moving back home has never been closer. The brutal civil war—which started when the Assad regime began violently cracking down on protestors like Ibrahim in 2011—forced millions of Syrians out of their homes. Two months after Assad’s shocking and swift fall, the UN Refugee Agency estimated that some 270,000 Syrians had already returned to their home country. In a February 2025 survey of Syrians conducted across four countries that hosted a large population of refugees—Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt—80 percent of respondents said that they hoped to return to Syria one day, up from 57 percent in April 2024. Over a quarter planned to go back within the next year. 

But the tens of thousands of Syrians that arrived in the United States as refugees face an uncertain future. In New York, between the start of the war and 2017, an estimated one hundred of those Syrian individuals resettled in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. More families moved to small cities upstate like Albany and Buffalo, as refugee agencies often prefer to resettle families in calmer areas for an easier transition. Some, like Rabia’s family, found it easiest to arrive where they already had family. 

As of September 2025, about 6,000 Syrians remained in the U.S. under Temporary Protection Status (TPS), which allows people from countries devastated by war or disaster to temporarily stay in the U.S. without the threat of deportation. With a green light from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump administration revoked TPS for Syrians in June, potentially rendering thousands of residents undocumented.

This small community of Syrians in New York are grappling with a big decision: whether to continue life under uncertain terms in the U.S. or return to rebuild their life in Syria. Ilham Almahamid, the founder of New York for Syrian Refugees, a nonprofit started in 2016 to help resettle the dozens of Syrian families that arrived to Albany, says that many of the first families who came intend to stay in New York. “Their kids are now grown up, they’re in university.” Almahamid told me. “And the situation in Syria is not yet stable.”

The organization and its network of volunteers help newcomers set up doctor appointments, find employment, communicate housing issues with landlords, and more. Many Syrians have set the foundation for their new lives here, and some have even bought their own houses. “We are really proud of our families. They work really hard,” Almahamid said. 

But those who have arrived more recently feel more undecided. “They are not able to make a decision because they don’t have much in Syria. They left everything. And they don’t have much here. They are still struggling to find a job, to pay their bills,” Almahamid said. “They don’t know if they go there, they will be able to find a job… the Assad regime left the country totally destroyed.” Those who plan to move back and rebuild their homeland hope to do so on their own terms. 

When I first met Rabia in the summer of 2025, she was still weighing her options, unsure of what life in Syria looked like since she left around the age of twelve. Before their lives were uprooted, Rabia’s mom was a civil engineer who hoped to open a hair salon. Her father was working at the transit center of Latakia. She and her brothers were in school. For as long as they could, her parents protected her from knowing the oppression they lived under, which came forcefully into view when the revolution started. 

She told me about her father, who at fifty and almost at retirement age, had to give everything up and start over and come to America. “My dad, in my eyes, he’s my hero…He was so passionate about Syria. He was a big reason I loved Syria so much.” Rabia said. “Unfortunately, he couldn’t see Syria get liberated.” 

After they moved to New York, both Rabia’s father and middle brother passed away in 2020, five months apart. For Rabia, New York became tainted with bad memories, the pain of those losses following her everywhere in the city. 

As summer turned to fall last year, Rabia kept busy seven days a week working as a driving instructor alongside her mom and taking online classes in psychology. She was the most depressed she had ever been. She didn’t want to stay in New York; neither did her mother. But she wasn’t planning on moving back to Syria—things were still very unpredictable—but settling elsewhere, maybe Turkey. 

But when she finally visited her hometown this January, everything changed. “It felt like I was living the days that I was deprived,” Rabia told me. She saw her grandmother and the shop owner by her old school. She saw her childhood home, her elementary school. Her days passed by blissfully. Everything felt perfectly preserved in time—on one hand, this was a tragic reminder of the ways Assad neglected the country and deterred its development. On the other hand, it was a comforting familiarity that made return seem feasible. 

She saw the problems that continue to plague the new Syria, like persistent electric cuts and high unemployment. Since rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham toppled Assad and Ahmed al-Sharaa took power, the new president has sought to reunify a country fractured by opposing parties vying for power. (Syria has largely centralized its government since dissolving large parts of the Syrian Democratic Forces–led Kurdish autonomous region in the Northeast, though Israel–backed Druze militia groups have taken control of Sweida.) 

But the identitarianism and scarcity mindset that suffocated Syrians under Assad did not disappear at the moment of liberation. People still distrust one another, and water, electricity, and food supplies often continue to operate under a system of bribery and nepotism. “People are not used to the experience of freedom,” Rabia told me, and they haven’t learned a new way to live yet. 

Still, nothing could compare to the depravity of life under the Assad regime, Rabia told me. In the Syria that she revisited, officials at checkpoints no longer executed people for the name or neighborhood on their identity cards. More men were on the streets, as they no longer were forced to serve in Assad’s army or fearful that they would be disappeared for refusing to do so. You could go out alone, move freely and safely. Assad’s face was no longer plastered everywhere like an omnipresent force. And neither was the face of the new president. New businesses started to open. The economy started to strengthen. Seeing Syria in this more positive light, without the suffocating feeling of being watched, was not something Rabia took for granted. “It kind of made me thankful I never got to go back when Bashar was there, because I would have had a very, very wrong idea of Syria,” she said. “I think I would have hated it and never wanted to come back.”

The fall of the Assad regime has also opened up doors for those living in diaspora to visit their country of heritage for the first time. Muna Al Fadl is a twenty-three-year-old Syrian-Sicilian artist living in New York City, whose father immigrated from Damascus to San Francisco in the late 1980s to escape the Hafez al-Assad regime. As a child, she was always aware of her distance from Syria, searching through her father’s family photos taken in Damascus and Idlib, knowing that a tyrannical regime and a civil war barred her from seeing these cities herself. 

Spending her childhood living inside a nostalgia that wasn’t her own inspires Al Fadl’s artwork today. Her paintings, which can be seen on display in the Astoria Art Center, include scenes of Damascus streets rendered from images on Google Earth, many of which are panoramas uploaded decades ago by tour guides. 

And for a long time, Al Fadl thought that she would only know Syria from a distance. “I always thought, It’s never gonna end. I’m never gonna step foot in Syria.” The fall of the Assad regime opened up for her a new relationship with the country. “I can go home and be in Syria, and understand my culture on a different level, and not be Syrian American, not be Syrian diaspora. I can just be Syrian now.” 

Al Fadl tells me that there are people in her family who are thinking of returning, but—considering their financial privilege, and the scarcity of housing in Syria—they want people who left the country most recently as a result of the civil war to return first. She’s excited to see Syrians rebuild a strong, united country for themselves, and resolve any problems that persist. “I have hope that Syrians will solve it. I think it will be done. I think Syrians are actively trying to solve it. I think there are so many Syrians moving back and that is their goal, to be a part of the cultural conversation, to be a part of the work.”

When I met up with Rabia again this spring, she had just quit her job at the driving school. There was a visible lightness to her, as she told me about the trip she just took and the ones she would take again in the near future. While she was in Syria, she told me, she kept remembering her father shaving his beard by the sink, blasting old Umm Kulthum tunes. “In my childhood home, it just felt like my dad was there. People kept asking me to come sleep over, but I wanted to stay there, where I could feel my dad.” 

Rabia visited Syria again in June, this time with her mother, who hadn’t stepped foot in her country for fifteen years. This time, they were able to get out of the city, see the mountains and the sea. Rabia hopes in the farther future, her own children will be able to enjoy long, slow, peaceful days in Syria. “I would want my kids to live the childhood that I wasn’t able to, around family, in their own country, in their own homes.”

This piece is part of the Summer 2026 issue.