31 March 2025

Homs, Syria– On a cold February night, a group of friends in the Syrian city of Homs gathered beside the heat of a steel furnace, sipping Yerba mate, a popular drink of South American origins.  They were meeting at Harmony, a grassroots peacebuilding initiative, a space in which they say they felt more protected than in their neighbourhoods.

The mood was somber. Hours earlier, a young woman was walking alone in her neighbourhood, Wadi al-Dhahab, when an armed man on a motorcycle attempted to grab her. The incident happened just beside 25-year-old Lynn Kalthoum’s home, shocking her and exacerbating her already-crushing sense of insecurity.  

“People didn’t interfere, no one helped her,” Kalthoum told The New Arab. “The people had guns, we don’t know if they’re [security] officials or not.”  

Since the fall of the Assad regime in December, kidnappings and killings — many directed against Syria’s minority Alawite sect, to which the ousted Assad family belong — have been ongoing in Homs, with cases spiking in February and March. As a result, fear and even paranoia have spread throughout Homs and forced many people to flee the city and even the country.  

“I feel shaky because I don’t know what’s happening around me,” 26-year-old Catherine, who was sitting next to Kalthoum, told The New Arab. She requested to go by a pseudonym, wary of repercussions if her identity was revealed.  

Catherine felt her neighbourhood in Homs, Hamidiyeh, had become notably more dangerous after the fall of the regime.   

“I feel scared, I feel like the space is tightening around me, like I’m suffocating but I don’t know from what, exactly,” she said, as she raised her hands in front of her and brought them closer together as if she was squeezing an invisible object.  

By late March, the danger was weighing on the two young women. Both were hoping to leave Syria. “I sincerely can’t take it anymore,” said Catherine in a follow-up exchange on March 24. “I get severe panic attacks because I’m afraid something would happen in the night or my family would be killed.”  

Catherine’s phone rang, and she abruptly stopped talking to answer the call from her mother. “I just needed to know if my mom was okay,” she said after she got off the line, apologising for the interruption.   

Catherine said her mom was followed a few days ago by a man who tried to rob her. She was able to run away, hiding in a nearby shop. 

“It’s so random, and it’s really scary,” Catherine said. The lack of reliable news on the attacks was exacerbating Catherine’s anxiety. “You feel more lost trying to search for what’s happening because no one official is speaking,” she said.