Syria Will Rise Again - By Radwan Ziadeh

Exactly five years after I was exiled from Syria, I was able to return to my homeland because of the Syrian revolution.

I left Syria in September 2007 after being directly threatened by Syria's General Intelligence Administration (Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Amma). The agency, which has branches in every Syrian province and is responsible for monitoring dissidents, tapping phone lines, and censoring media, objected to my involvement with the Damascus Declaration in 2005. The agency not only issued an arrest warrant for me, but banned my entire family from traveling outside Syria. The travel ban weighed most heavily on my sister and her five children. My sister's husband lives in Saudi Arabia, and due to the ban, her children have been unable to see their father for four years -- solely because their mother is related to a human rights activist and political opposition figure.

This September, after five long years, I was finally able to return. I entered Syria safely from Turkey through the Bab al-Salama border crossing, which is controlled by the Free Syrian Army. As I crossed through the portal, I felt so many emotions. I wept tears of joy. I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I was returning to my homeland after being forced to leave it and that I would be able to see my family and fellow citizens in a new, free Syria.

When crossing into Syria from Turkey, I noticed that the ubiquitous pictures of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator whose family has held the destiny of Syria in its hands for 40 years, were missing. In the pictures' stead were walls covered with the words "Free Syria." But my thoughts were quickly overwhelmed with the knowledge of the shocking tragedy facing Syrians today: Millions are displaced, and hundreds of thousands have fled the country for fear of being killed by the Syrian regime's constant, indiscriminate shelling. Even then, many of those who have managed to flee Syria have not found safety. Thousands of the refugees live homeless on Turkish streets. Refugee camps on the Turkish border, already unbearably crowded with some 85,000 Syrians, have no more room for the thousands that continue to spill over the border.

It is difficult to envision Syria's future. A cry of a child is horrible enough -- it is even worse when you contemplate how Syria's children are caught in a no man's land between Turkey and Syria, with no school, no playground, and an uncertain road ahead.

And of course, Syrians will never forget those who paid the ultimate price for their country. More than 30,000 Syrians have given their lives since the revolution began, and untold thousands still languish in Assad's jails.

As we continued driving into Syria, I couldn't believe my eyes. Was I really in Syria? I wanted to see everything at once. I tried to take pictures of everything -- a vain attempt at recovering all that I had lost in the five years since I had been driven out of my home.