By Sam Sweeney National Review

Recently I was in the city of Hassakeh, Syria, sitting and making small talk with two Syrians, one Kurdish and the other Syriac Christian. The Christian said he would like to invite me to his house but, because he lives in the government-controlled area of the city, he couldn’t. He’d previously had a guest from another Arab country, and the government’s security service immediately knocked on his door, asking who the guest was. As an American journalist without a Syrian visa, I would not be welcome in the government-held part of the city. (Hassakeh is currently divided between the majority of the city that falls under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and a small section that falls under the control of the Syrian government.) The Kurd sitting with us immediately piped in, saying that it was for the people’s benefit that the government kept such a close watch on the security situation. That was why Syria was so safe before the war. The Christian enthusiastically agreed.

The conversation was remarkable only in that I have a similar one almost every day in northeastern Syria. A great nostalgia has taken hold for iyyam ad-dawleh, the days when the government was in charge. I hear it from Christians, Kurds, and Arabs. While I would posit that the nostalgia comes with a healthy dose of selective memory loss about the worst behaviors of the Syrian regime, it nonetheless also carries an obvious truth: You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. “We were living in a dream, and now we’ve woken up,” an Assyrian Christian in his twenties told me. While there are obviously many who disagree, a large share of Syrians I talk to would rewind the clock to 2010 if they could and do everything pos­sible to prevent the anti-Assad protests from starting. That sentiment is most pronounced among Christians, and much of that community never left the Assad government’s side throughout the conflict.

READ MORE