Obeid Kaifo hasn’t slept much the last few days.
He’s always a busy guy, running the family restaurant across from the state Capitol and usually in the thick of some effort promoting cultural acceptance or efforts to free Syria from decades of horror under the Assad regime.
The generations-old dictatorship in Syria collapsed over the weekend after years of persistence by rebel efforts and forces. Deposed President Bashar Assad is reportedly now in Moscow, given cover by his longtime ally President Vladimir Putin.
Kaifo has been mesmerized by the tragedy of Syria almost his entire life, and certainly since was a student at Overland High School in central Aurora in 2005. His parents grew up in Syria and moved to California in the 1980s, where Obeid was born.
The generations-old Syrian regime was never coy about iron-fist torture, corruption and abuse of regime critics. The Hama Massacre of 1981 started with 400 men. A year later, as many as 40,000 Syrian Sunni Muslims were rounded up and murdered.
His entire life, Obeid absorbed stories of his father’s family in Aleppo living an increasingly marginalized life under the cancerous corruption and oppression of the Assad regime.
Obeid’s father, a math teacher, had left the country for a job in Algeria after college. When a Syrian government official told another teacher about intelligence on his father’s personal life, he and his wife knew they couldn’t return to Aleppo. They moved to California, and eventually Aurora, a community filled with immigrants and home to many Muslims.
In 2008, two years before a massive rebel uprising evolved into civil war, Obeid and his brothers made the trek to Aleppo to see family and their historical homeland for themselves.
The entire month they were there was filled with a taste of what was to come for years.
He spent the month just after the Eid holiday with family members, absorbing the fear and dread of the government residents every day, even as he left for home.
An American citizen, Obeid was harassed by Syrian officials at the airport coming home. At 19, he would have faced military conscription as a Syrian citizen. His American birthright and Syrian heritage became an unnerving issue at the airport. There was a scary discussion about whether he should be incarcerated as a draft dodger.
“The delay caused me to miss my flight,” he recalled, but he got home.
Obeid’s extended family in Aleppo dealt directly with stark and relentless terror.
After rebels rushed into Aleppo in 2012 and were then forced to retreat, one of his uncles was hounded and eventually confronted in the family home by Assad regime’s political police, whose offices were next door to the long-time home of his grandfather.
First harassed, “they burned him alive,” Obeid said.
He was in his 70s. His older brother, concerned about him, made the trek across town, back to the neighborhood to check on him.
He was shot by snipers crossing the street, Obeid said. He was in his 80s.
“His body lay in the median for 12 days,” Obeid said. “It was so bad that it was like, if you were shot in the streets, there was nobody to pick you up. Can you imagine living in a place like that?”
A cousin made his way through the embattled city, literally jumping from building roof to building roof, eventually getting the story of what happened from horrified neighbors.
“He goes down the stairwell, and he ends up sneaking into the room, to the house, and he sees him where he was burned alive,” Obeid said. “It was just a burnt body. The only thing they recognized of him was his knuckles. The knuckles on his hand. I’ll never forget that.”
While the ghastly abuses the Assad government inflicted on Syrians continued, often under the radar of U.S. media and public, Obeid became a local activist to keep the crisis in Syria visible.
He had every intention of going to medical school when he received his degree in biology in 2015.
But work at the Shish Kabob Grill, his father’s restaurant in Downtown Denver, and the compulsion to press the U.S. government to come to the aid of Syrian people and rebels, was engrossing.
For the past 14 years, he has raised awareness among Colorado politicians, regional officials and even his own customers about the plight of Muslims in the Middle East and the United States, and especially those abused by the Syrian regime.
He was just a boy during the abuse of American Muslims in Aurora after Sept. 11. But he was a young adult when Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and Muslim ban thundered across the region.
“My family restaurant was targeted as terrorists” by vandals once during the last few years because of his work on the Syrian rebel cause.
But all that has changed now.
Defeating the cancerous Assad thugs isn’t just a victory for Syrians, Obeid said. It’s a victory for all of Islam.
He said that Syria, even under authoritarian rule, had long been an inclusive, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nation, where people were considered for what they said, what they did and not by their religion, race or sect.
“My father went to school with a girl and didn’t know for years that she was Jewish,” Obeid said. Syrians weren’t identified by such things in the 1960s and 1970s, his father told him.
For years, Obeid has been consumed by rebellion in the nation, and how the horrors were regularly set aside or even ignored by the U.S. government and most American media.
He has depended on a small stable of Syrian and global news sources for updates about the nation of 23 million people.
For the last few weeks, he’s been glued to WhatsApp, and other international media sources as the implosion of the Assad regime played out.
“I can’t look away,” he said Sunday. “I don’t think a lot of people will ever appreciate how heinous this regime has been.”
He said he, and his family, agree with experts who are confident that rebel forces will create a government that Syria wants and deserves.
Criticism and worry that a leadership vacuum will be filled by different terrorists is just Russian, Iranian and Assad propaganda talk, Obeid said. The country has a complicated history in the region and the world.
“You’ve got to give Syrians more credit than that.”
For now, he relishes watching media photos and film of the faces of Syrians in the street, their expressions fundamentally changed by news that Assad and his brutal regime of terror are finally, really gone. The optimism and relief in his voice is a vivid contrast to his recalling Syrian horrors in detail.
Thousands of political prisoners, some young girls, are being freed from their cells, held because of their criticism of Assad or alleged sympathy with rebels.
Freedom has a new and personal meaning for Obeid now.
The hardest thing for him is watching it from afar. He wants to be there.
“I can’t wait,” Obeid said. He and his father want to go as soon as a new government there makes it practical for them.
“I want to feel what that’s like,” he said. “There.”
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