Mohamad Salem Ajaj has been selling a lot of sweets at his grocery store in Quadra Village since word spread that more than 50 years of Assad dynasty rule in Syria was coming to an end.
Ajaj reckons he sold at least 250 boxes of baklava and a host of other sweets at Damascus Food Market over the weekend to people celebrating the end of 13 years of war between the government and opposition forces.
On Monday, Ajaj had a quick exchange in Arabic with a woman who stopped by to buy a box of sweets.
She had come to Canada around a year ago after her husband was killed by Assad regime forces and is now anxiously waiting to find out if her 14-year-old incarcerated son was among those released from prison by opposition forces, Ajaj said.
In the meantime, she planned to share the sweets with her classmates at the Inter-Cultural Association language school, he said.
For much of the past week, Damascus Food Market on Hillside Avenue has been a hub of activity, with people coming in to exchange information about what was happening in Syria, as the sudden offensive by opposition groups began gaining momentum in that country.
Ajaj said that by Friday, he was confident Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime would fall and began moving the sweets section to a more prominent part of the shop that afternoon.
For the first time in many years, he was able to see videos of his bombed-out house in the central Jobor neighbourhood of Damascus, sent to him by his in-laws, whose communications had been restricted by the regime, Ajaj said.
Though much of his old shop and house was reduced to rubble, Ajaj was elated at the prospect of being able to rebuild some parts of his old life in Syria.
He wants his four children to meet their grandparents for the first time, he said, although he doesn’t yet have a timeline for a visit to Syria.
Times are busy for Ajaj, who is planning to expand Damascus Food Market, which has already moved once into a larger location since he began his business in 2019.
Before arriving in Victoria in 2016, the family had moved to three other countries — Algeria, Lebanon and Turkey — in search of a safe life with opportunities for his children, now school-aged.
“I built my future here, for my kids,” said Ajaj, who is in his early 40s.
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people — many of them part of the Syrian community in Victoria — gathered at the B.C. legislature to sing, dance and chant revolutionary slogans.
Many of the three-star Syrian revolutionary flags waving in the air and draped on people’s shoulders were made shortly before the gathering, some drawn on cardboard, others sewn the night before.
Abed, a rally attendee who did not want his last name published, is hoping that his uncle is among those being freed from Saydnaya military prison by the opposition forces.
The uncle was arbitrarily arrested and detained in the prison in the summer of 2013 when he returned to Syria from Lebanon for a visa renewal, Abed said.
No one knows if he’s alive or dead, he said, adding that his family has tried many times to find out what happened but never received a clear answer about his uncle’s fate.
Abed knows what it’s like to be detained in one of the government’s “security branches.”
In 2015, Abed, who was studying law in the port city of Latakia, spent 19 days in detention for posting a comment on Facebook agreeing with a post criticizing the Assad government.
He was thrown into a two-square-metre room with no lights and windows and was brought out from his cell with his hands tied and face hooded to listen to the sounds of his fellow prisoners being beaten by guards.
“The screams of the women, they’re still in my head until today,” Abed said.
Abed, who arrived in Canada through a post-secondary student refugee sponsorship program in 2019, said many of the Syrians who arrived in Victoria following the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011 were talking about how they are grateful to the 91原创s who welcomed them with open arms.
“We can’t thank you enough,” he said. “You gave us a new life, even though we wish to be home now and feel great with our people there.”
Abed, who has been glued to the news and has barely slept since the insurgency began sweeping across Syria, said everyone is waiting to see what will happen next. “We know now there are many people who were told that their relatives died by the regime, and they got out [of prisons] in Haba and Homs, in Aleppo and Damascus,” he said.
The most important thing is that people can be freed from the “human slaughterhouses” like Saydnaya, he said.
About 300 people have been freed, but the clock is ticking for those trapped in the prison after departing guards locked down some of the underground sections of Saydnaya and disabled the life-support systems, he said.
Abed called on international humanitarian aid organizations to help with rescue efforts.
“Before the regime left, they turned off the ventilation,” he said. “They are smelling bodies in some of the vents.”
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