(Article image generated using AI)
From success to below zero, a story that represents thousands of distressed people on the Syrian coast
In a small corner of the coastal city of Jableh, Ahmed Abdel Rahman spent his days quietly in his shop dedicated to the maintenance and sale of advanced technical equipment. The shop was not just a means of livelihood, but the fruit of many years of work and determination, which the young man built brick by brick, despite all the challenges, in a homeland exhausted by death and displacement.
I knew Ahmed from a young age, says the young man’s friend. He was an educated and moral young man with a passion for computer engineering and digital technologies. He refused to take up arms and join the war. Instead, he left and expatriated to Lebanon, where he worked for more than six years in the technology field he loved, developed himself, saved what he could, returned to his country, and paid his military service. He believed that Syria deserved to be built with science, not blood.
With all the money and experience he had accumulated, he opened his shop and started to grow it little by little, and started his journey in a life he wanted to be productive and dignified. He didn’t want to leave, he said he would stay and build, no matter how hard it was, and he married in his home country and had a child.
A man who has nothing but goodness… and only knows how to give
Ahmed was not only a trader, but also a man with white hands. He was known in his neighbourhood for his kind spirit, and was even given new hope after the fall of the Assad regime and the promises of the new government. At the height of the economic siege and the silent famine that the coast suffered, especially as a result of arbitrary dismissals and salary cuts, instead of lamenting on social media, he organised charitable field initiatives to collect donations from home and abroad, which helped save hundreds of families from hunger. He prepared food baskets, provided medicine, and took care of services in his village that the state was unable to provide.
But what was his reward?
Stealing everything. Ruining a lifetime of hard work
The tragedy started in batches, as if the pain doesn’t like to come all at once:
- In the first robbery, his shop was raided by unidentified thieves belonging to undisciplined factions that came to the coast, but young men affiliated with the authorities also chased the thieves and returned part of the stolen items.
- In the second robbery, everything else was stolen. A neighbour – a Sunni – intervened, chased away the thieves and locked the shop for his own protection.
- The third time, thethieves came back again. There was nothing to steal, but they finished what they started, leaving only the destruction as a testament to what happened.
The losses exceeded $40,000, according to his estimates, half of which were debts owed for the goods in the shop. But he didn’t shout, he didn’t complain, he just said:
“Alhamdulillah, this was a sacrifice for our health, God willing, we will continue to live.”
Starting over from scratch.. from scratch
It wasn’t an easy decision, but he had no choice. After losing everything he had built over the years – his shop, his equipment, his labour, his dreams – Ahmed had to leave his country again. He returned to the West with a broken heart, but with his head held high, looking for a job to repair his loss and support his small family and the people he refused to leave alone in the most difficult times. He is still trying to continue organising humanitarian work in his small village from afar.
Ahmed left with great pain in his heart, but he did not lose his humanity or his belief that dignity begins with remaining standing even if everything around you is destroyed. Ahmed did not ask for revenge, nor for vengeance, but only for justice.
A vivid example of the alarming deterioration of economic conditions in the Sahel
Ahmad’s incident was not just a robbery, but another facet of the social and economic collapse hitting the Syrian coast, in light of repeated massacres that killed more than 1,600 civilians in Jableh, Baniyas and Latakia during the month of March alone, according to human rights reports.
These massacres, which are often glossed over in the media, were accompanied by a series of looting and destruction, affecting shops, homes, properties and even the dreams of simple people. Hundreds of shops were emptied, cars were burned, and people were displaced from their villages to the unknown. These massacres came after a giant wave of arbitrary dismissals from jobs that affected tens of thousands of coastal residents and deprived them of their pensions.
From hunger to daily humiliation
The people of the coast are facing severe difficulty in securing bread, medicine and food due to the severe economic deterioration that has hit the coast, bringing life to a standstill. Tens of thousands of government employees have been dismissed from their jobs, there have been delays in the payment of salaries for the rest, and former military personnel have been demobilised and given temporary settlement cards instead of personal IDs (which have often been the cause of their conviction and humiliation at some checkpoints).
In addition to the spread of crime and insecurity, the question “Alawite or Sunni” has become ubiquitous and natural. This has led people to stay at home and contributed to the stoppage of economic activities and the deterioration of the situation.
More seriously, people are no longer able to distinguish between those who protect them and those who blackmail them. Between the disciplined element and those who look at them with sectarian hatred and abuse them in the name of “authority”.
In Jableh, despair is built on the ruins of love
Ahmed’s story, despite its simplicity, sums up the situation of thousands of others who fled from injustice only to receive another injustice, to be held responsible for the guilt of an entire people and to be punished for crimes they did not commit! Those who built something in this country have lost everything. Not just money, but years of life, faith in justice, confidence in tomorrow. And yet, they still say: “Alhamdulillah, with hope”.
A video showing part of the deliberate vandalism carried out in the city of Jableh in conjunction with the massacres on the Syrian coast.
In Jableh, and in every corner of the Syrian coast, people are killed over and over again:
Once by the brutality and injustice of the regime.
then again by the theft of their life’s labour and hard work.
Thirdly, when they are held responsible for crimes they did not commit.
And the fourth time by treacherous bullets that do not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.
But we write … so that the stories are not forgotten, so that the tragedy does not become a number, and the oppressed does not become a mere shadow in a broken memory.