Soon after the collapse of the Assad government in Syria, Issam Barakat, a Syrian journalist working for Nikkei’s Dubai bureau, was shocked to learn that he had been wanted by the notoriously brutal regime. Barakat fled Syria at the onset of the civil war in 2011, with several of his relatives enduring torture at the hands of the government. In the wake of the regime’s fall, he shared his complex feelings about his homeland and his cautious hopes for its future.
While I was walking through the old streets of Cairo on a recent visit to Egypt, the last thing I could have imagined is that I had been wanted by the Syrian regime headed by President Bashar al-Assad, which had just fallen. I had left Syria in 2011 when the civil war began and since then had found work as a journalist in Nikkei’s bureau in Dubai.
