Syria

Harry travels Syria in spring 2025, months after the rebels took power and the former leader was ousted. His framing is that this is a country nobody could visit independently in his lifetime — you needed a tour guide and permission — and that a foreigner can now walk around it alone.

The mood he reports is wary but hopeful, with the fear named explicitly: that Syria goes the way of Libya or Iraq, where the dictator fell and the country got worse.

Observations

From Solo Entering the New Syria (After the Dictator Fell)

• The land border removes the visa requirement. British citizens need a visa to fly in; crossing overland from Lebanon, Harry is told, you are stamped in free. That’s what happened — about half an hour at the border.
• The stamps in your passport matter more than the visa. The questions were about where else he had been. He travels on two passports, which took some explaining.
• Dollars are king. You can pay in them directly, and the Syrian pound is changed on the street rather than in banks.
• Two exchange rates. The bank rate is bad; the street rate — everyone’s term for it is the black market rate — is what Syrians use. Harry got 10,800 to the dollar against an online figure of 11,000, and $100 makes you a millionaire in a brick of notes you then have to carry.
• Sanctions are the visible constraint. No eSIM works here at all and a foreigner can’t get a local SIM, so Harry travels the country with no data. Hotel prices are inflated for the same reason.
• Reconstruction is the political question. Billions are arriving from the EU and the UK; the figure Harry cites for what recovery actually needs is over $300 billion.
• Security is heavy and mostly informal — armed personnel in and out of uniform, which Harry compares to Afghanistan and says he is used to. He doesn’t film them.
• Damascus is safe; the rest is an open question. Harry’s own read is that the capital is very safe. A young policeman he talks to says flatly that the country is not safe — not Damascus, not anywhere. Both are recorded.
• Society is more mixed than the demographics suggest. Many women on the streets without hijab, Christians celebrating Easter, churches beside mosques, and a genuine nightlife — bars and tattoo shops in the old city.
• The new flag is in use everywhere, and Harry notes there is no emoji for it yet.
• The food comparison to make is with Lebanon, and Syria is the one people — including Lebanese people — say wins. Sweets especially.

From Hitchhiking with Rebels through the New Syria

• Fifty years under one family. Hafez al-Assad took power in the 1970s and was succeeded by his son; the new government is three to five months old at the time of filming.
• The population halved. Around 22 million before the civil war, about 12 million now, through death and displacement.
• The destruction is countrywide, not localised. This is the thing Harry says he was not prepared for — not pockets of ruins but whole cities, including the centres of Damascus and Aleppo.
• Torture under the old government is a first-hand account here, not a statistic: one of the men who gives Harry a lift was imprisoned for months, denied water, and had his fingernails pulled out.
• There is a petrol crisis. Fuel is smuggled from Lebanon and sold at the roadside in plastic bottles.
• The average wage is $80 a month. Food is cheap and everything else is not.
• Checkpoints are frequent on the roads between cities. Harry films none of them, and is helped through one by a soldier who wouldn’t be filmed either.
• Hospitality outruns him. His drivers refuse the cigarettes he tries to buy them, buy him some instead, and pay for his onward taxi — and that taxi driver then declines to charge him twice.
• A country running without a state. With the rebel forces effectively the government and very little formal administration, Harry reports no looting, no disorder and almost no crime — money changers stack cash in public squares untouched. His comparison is that the UK without police would be far worse.
• What Syrians say about safety, from someone who lives there: safe, but not 100%; people from the old government are still hiding and still killing; stick to the main cities.
• Everyone speaks positively about the change — and Harry flags on camera that he has heard nothing negative even off camera, and that people may feel they have to. It is the one place where the off-camera check comes back clean; see expect a script on camera.

Places

• Damascus
• Homs
• Aleppo