After Seven Years, My Job Is No Longer Syria Conflict-Related

Arlington, MA-February 2023

On Tuesday, I left all my Syria WhatsApp groups and unsubscribed from Syria update emails and live trackers. Afterwards I felt a huge sense of relief.

I have more to say about it – about what changed in my life these past seven years: moving from single to married, age 22 to 29, and from Jordan to the US to Jordan to the US. And about the conflict itself, how it changed over time: right now, eleven years in, it’s frozen. A stalemate between Assad and everyone else.

But this week I was only feeling the guilt and relief.

There is survivor’s guilt, of course there is. I can leave it behind. I have the privilege of not thinking about this. This was always a job for me. Actually, it was three different jobs over seven years.

In the first job, I worked at a Youth Center in Zaatari Camp, a Syrian refugee camp in northern Jordan, for three and a half years. Then for the last three and a half years, I’ve been doing research and analysis relating to Syria – essentially, writing Syria conflict reports.

In the first half of those seven years, I couldn’t help but know what was going on in the war: it was the constant topic of conversation between me and my Syrian colleagues at the Youth Center. In the second half, I was no longer working in Zaatari, but I had to dig into the details of Syria so I could write about them in my reports.

Last month I switched to a new project at my company, and it has nothing to do with Syria. It’s a global project, not focused on any one country. The new project focuses on a lot of places I know nothing about. It seems I’ll be on a steep learning curve.

In January, I was mostly working on my new team, but I still had one foot holding the Syria door open, because I had to train my replacement on my old project before I could fully move on.

My replacement is now pretty much up to speed, and so this week, I let the door swing shut.

I can stop thinking about Syria now.

This is the immense privilege of indifference: what’s happening in ___? Shoulder shrug. No idea.

The Syrian colleagues and friends I’ve made over the years do not have that option. Many of them are actually living outside Syria, but their families are back there. They talk to them constantly. They are up to date on the conflict in a personal way, while I was always up to date on the conflict in a professional way.

This wouldn’t always work, but I would at least try to think about Syria only between 9 and 5 on weekdays, during work time. My Syrian friends think about it all the time.

I chose to do Syria-related jobs for the past years. And a few months ago, I chose to leave my project at work and transfer to a new team. (That was for several reasons, but one of them was, yes, I wanted to stop focusing on Syria.)

Over the years I would get bogged down sometimes by war stories. One day recently, I wrote to you about just that.

I wrote,

“I can never tell why most of the time I’m not (noticeably) affected by what I read, hear, and see in the Syria news, and then occasionally I am. It seems as though I am hugely affected every 29th or 45th or 63rd time I read a gruesome story or see a photo of a bloodied body in Syria. As though the stories accumulate invisibly inside me until they reach a critical mass: then strike.”

At many points I thought to myself: perhaps this is too long to focus on any one country, conflict, war. After all, I’m not Syrian. Of course I feel invested in what happens in Syria, but it is indirectly, because of my Syrian friends.

I have a good friend who still lives in Zaatari. She’s been living there, oh God, I guess a decade now. How depressing! She and her husband are debating whether to stay in Zaatari (terrible living conditions) or try to travel overland to Europe (dangerous, risky, no guarantees). Her cousin has done it: made it to Europe from Zaatari. She would try to take a similar route. She and I have been texting a bit back and forth. The decision is weighing so heavily on her and her husband, she tells me. They keep going back and forth: stay or go. Go or stay.

I care about my friend and what happens to her. I care about my other Syrian friends and their families, and what happens to them. I care about whether or not Syria becomes safe enough for them to go back home.

But whatever happens, and whatever Assad, Biden, Putin, Erdogan, and Khamenei (the five men who have such outsized influence on the lives of the 21 million people still in Syria) decide to do from here, my life is not directly affected. And my own family is safe in the US.

This safety (from war at least; we in America face plenty of other dangers), and simply never having to think twice about it, is something I try not to take for granted.

Still, I am really relieved (though I feel guilty admitting it) that, for my job, it is no longer a requirement that I know what is happening week in and week out in Syria. I don’t need to know about the latest ISIS attack, the latest US drone strike, the latest updates on the economy, the latest Syrian pound to US dollar ratio, the latest statements from Assad, Biden, Putin, Erdogan, or Khamenei.

I’ll hear about it here and there from my Syrian friends who I still keep in touch with, but I don’t need to click into the live conflict tracker on a Monday morning and check what happened over the weekend.

That’s a relief.