{"id":269894,"date":"2026-02-02T07:18:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T07:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/269894\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T07:18:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T07:18:07","slug":"syrian-rapper-al-darwish-returns-home-after-13-years-to-perform-in-post-assad-damascus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/269894\/","title":{"rendered":"Syrian rapper Al Darwish returns home after 13 years to perform in post-Assad Damascus"},"content":{"rendered":"

DAMASCUS, Syria — Hani Al Sawah recently walked the streets of Damascus, Syria’s capital, with wide-eyed excitement. It had been 13 years since the rap artist last was in Syria<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Later that night, he would take the stage to perform his unapologetically political songs in his home country for the first time without the Assad dynasty in power<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Al Sawah, who performs under the stage name Al Darwish, couldn\u2019t contain his excitement.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever in my wildest dreams did I think I could ever return to Syria,\u201d he told The Associated Press after a sold-out show on Jan. 16, followed by another one the next day. He could barely hear himself as the audience sang along to every lyric.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have this weird feeling that I never left, or that I left a part of me here that I was able to find again,\u201d Al Sawah said.<\/p>\n

During the uprising in 2011, before he fled Syria to neighboring Lebanon in 2012 and later Germany, Al Sawah\u2019s fiery lyrics about mass protests defying dictatorship in Syria shed light on a rap scene not many imagined existed. <\/p>\n

His songs also paid tribute to other anti-government protests in the region. He also witnessed monthslong protests in Lebanon not long before leaving for Europe.<\/p>\n

Al Sawah amassed a following online after leaving home, with many Syrians both at home and abroad relating to his music during the country\u2019s deadly civil war.<\/p>\n

Since his upbringing in the city of Homs<\/a>, Al Sawah has always been a rebel at heart. In 2001, he discovered rap music and soon realized it was a way for him to express himself. He was later part of an underground scene where he and others exchanged songs and ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a nice scene at the time in Homs, of course everything was underground and nobody knew anything about us and that we were rapping,\u201d he said. The authorities often pulled him and his friends aside asking why they dressed the way they did, saying it resembled \u201cdevil worshippers.\u201d Others told him that the hard-hitting music genre represented Western culture and imperialism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was the saying: Eat what you want but dress as the people want,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Al Sawah was elated and inspired by the uprising<\/a> against Syrian President Bashar Assad and his government, especially when mass demonstrations swept across the city of Homs. He secretly attended those protests, defying his father\u2019s orders not to out of fear for his life.<\/p>\n

Though it\u2019s been over a year<\/a> since a lightning insurgency in December 2024 took down the Assad dynasty\u2019s half-century rule, it wasn\u2019t until just last month that Al Sawah visited. While hopeful the new rulers in Damascus will build a just and prosperous country, he is concerned about incidents of violence that quickly turned sectarian. <\/p>\n

Al Sawah decided he had to return home, to see his father and to see what life was like in this new chapter of the country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened here were fast and sudden changes, and we\u2019re only talking about Damascus,\u201d the rapper said after taking a stroll on a boulevard in Syria\u2019s capital. \u201cSure it changed, but not like my city of Homs, Aleppo, or any of the cities where two-thirds or three-quarters of it were destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

When speaking to friends and others, Al Sawah was surprised to see a certain fear of criticizing the new authorities<\/a>, something he said was \u201cinherited\u201d from decades of living under Assad and the family\u2019s web of security agencies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we want to say that the regime really did fall, then so should this fear,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take away from his joy that Assad is gone, but online he spoke out against sectarian violence and how some people who opposed it under other circumstances tried to justify it.<\/p>\n

He was talking about a government counteroffensive against armed Assad loyalists of the Alawite religious minority along the coast that later turned into widespread revenge attacks targeting the community. <\/p>\n

Last summer government forces launched an intervention in the Druze-majority province<\/a> of Sweida, ostensibly to stop clashes between Druze militias and armed Bedouin tribes, but clearly siding with the latter. In both cases, hundreds of civilians were killed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can justify what happened on the coast \u2014 which of course you can\u2019t \u2014 by saying they were armed (Assad) loyalists and so on, then you cannot justify what happened in Sweida,\u201d he said, calling it a \u201cfatal error\u201d in the Islamist-led government\u2019s efforts to try to win the support of minorities and bring the country back together.<\/p>\n

During his performance, Al Sawah paid tribute to the coastal province and Sweida in one of his songs, admittedly nervous about how the crowd would react. To his surprise, they cheered and applauded, and that gave him hope.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the reaction I was looking for,” he said. “It\u2019s what encourages me to come back.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Chehayeb reported from Beirut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DAMASCUS, Syria — Hani Al Sawah recently walked the streets of Damascus, Syria’s capital, with wide-eyed excitement. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[140682,127,146,122,85,46,238,5468,55731,126],"class_list":["post-269894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-140682","tag-article","tag-entertainment","tag-general-news","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-politics","tag-protests-and-demonstrations","tag-rebellions-and-uprisings","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}