On an August evening in 2025, as wildfires swept across Syria’s coastal regions, Siwar al-Assad took to X with a message that cut through the noise: “Help is non-existent, and when it appears for show, it is deliberately delayed to punish areas populated by Alawites. The sectarian Islamist militias entrenched in Damascus are creating disasters and using them as weapons everywhere they control in Syria.” He ended his post with a rallying cry: “Let’s Make Syria Rise — Together.”
It was not the first time al–Assad had used his voice to confront silence. But for readers familiar with his novels, it was a reminder of what makes his work so urgent. He does not separate literature from life. For him, storytelling is resistance, and words are a way to reclaim the dignity of people often reduced to statistics.
Who is Siwar al-Assad
Born in Damascus in 1975, Siwar al-Assad grew up in the shadow of Syria’s ruling family—his father, Rifaat al-Assad, being the brother of former President Hafez al-Assad. Yet Siwar’s path diverged sharply from politics.
At the age of nine, after his family’s exile, he left Syria. His formative years were spent in Switzerland, Great Britain, and eventually at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, where he studied law. That dislocation, he has often implied, shaped his understanding of identity as something fragile, shifting, and personal.
Fluent in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, al Assad embodies the cultural complexity of the Syrian diaspora. For him, the experience of leaving Syria became both wound and compass, guiding the literary journey that followed.
Syria Beyond the Headlines
al-Assad’s novels are less about politics and more about people. His debut, À Cœur Perdu—later translated into English as Guard Thy Heart—introduced readers to Paul Ollenson, a United Nations lawyer who bears the physical and emotional burden of having undergone a heart transplant.
On the surface, it appears to be a romantic thriller. But underneath, it is a meditation on memory, loss, and the way trauma reshapes identity.
In Le Temps d’une Saison, al Assad takes readers to the glittering chaos of post-World War I Paris and the roaring 1920s in New York, through the eyes of Angèle de Lestrange, a woman navigating heartbreak and art trafficking conspiracies. It is both historical fiction and a reflection on personal reinvention.
Then came Palmyre pour toujours, a work that reveals al-Assad’s cultural mission most clearly. Written as an homage to Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra, the book mourns the devastation wrought by the war while calling for a global duty to preserve heritage. “Our history is not rubble,” al–Assad has said. “Even when cities fall, stories survive.”
His most recent novel, Damascus Has Fallen, carries the same spirit. Set against the backdrop of a country collapsing into chaos, it tells the story of ordinary Syrians whose choices—often impossible ones—become acts of survival and resistance. It is fiction, but it feels like testimony.
Literature as Advocacy
al–Assad’s influence extends beyond the page. He is the founder of the Aramea Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting Syrian refugees and safeguarding Levantine cultural heritage. In his role, he advocates for the values embedded in his fiction: dialogue, preservation, and human dignity.
While other public figures from Syria’s ruling family remain tied to a political legacy, Siwar al–Assad has carved out a unique space as a literary and cultural figure. His books are not only artistic works but also interventions in a broader conversation about how Syria is remembered, reconstructed, and represented.
A Voice in the Diaspora
Siwar Al–Assad is not alone. He belongs to a wider tradition of Arab authors in diaspora who use literature to bridge worlds—writers like Leila Aboulela, Hala Alyan, and Elias Khoury. But his work stands apart in its balance of personal exile and national memory. He writes as someone who has lived between cultures, yet refuses to let go of the identity rooted in his birthplace.
For readers in the West, his novels offer a more nuanced understanding of Syria than news reports can provide. For Syrians abroad, they offer validation—a reminder that their own fragmented identities can still hold coherence, beauty, and meaning.
In an era of political polarization and cultural amnesia, voices like Siwar al-Assad’s carry particular weight. His fiction is not propaganda, nor is it detached literature—it is something in between: a bridge, a witness, a quiet act of defiance.
He once wrote: “In writing this novel, I have thought about neither myself nor about my family. If certain elements are familiar, it is entirely coincidental.” And yet, the familiarity is precisely the point. His novels resonate because they feel lived-in, shaped by the silences and ruptures of exile, by the weight of history, and by the hope of return.
Siwar al-Assad is a voice of memory in an age of forgetting. And as Syria’s story continues to unfold, his words may yet prove essential in shaping how the world remembers, not just the war, but the people who lived through it.
