Dreams of Tremseh come alive as thousands return to Syrian village

TREMSEH — Driving east of Hama city, toward Syria’s coastal mountains, the dry desert dust gradually gives way to green. A ways farther down the winding road, a village comes into view, perched atop a hill in the distance. 

Those entering the village are greeted by clear springs, spurting buckets of drinkable water. A canopy of peach, plum and pomegranate trees stretches out as far as the eye can see. Fish jump in a stocked pond, and songbirds fly overhead on a clear summer day.

This is Tremseh, a home lost and now regained by thousands of residents newly returned after years of displacement in crowded camps. Together again, they are attempting to rebuild their community and heal the scars of a bloody past. 

Inside one home, Bassam al-Jassem, 40, cools off from the afternoon heat with his two close friends. Propped up on pillows and stretching out on the tile floor, they sip coffee and puff on cigarettes, laughing at jokes and sharing their stories of the past—and the future they hope for.

Bassam al-Jassem (left), Mamdouh al-Satouf (center), and Louay Sutel (right), tell stories in Sutel’s home in Tremseh, a village in northern Hama, 19/7/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

The majority of the Tremseh’s 14,000 residents fled following a massacre on July 12, 2012, dispersed in all directions. Protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad had swelled in the village, where the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) had a presence at the time. 

That day, “before the sun rose, we were suddenly surrounded from all sides with tanks and many soldiers,” Jassem remembers. For four hours, Assad’s helicopter gunships and tanks bombarded the village. Then ground forces and pro-regime shabiha militiamen stormed in, carrying out execution-style killings. 

Early reports of the death toll varied, from 300 to around 100. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has documented the killing of 67 civilians in Tremseh that day, including six children and a woman. Al-Jassem and his friends maintain that more than 300 were killed. 

At first, al-Jassem remained in Tremseh, the village now firmly under regime control. The following year, like so many of his neighbors, he could no longer stay. He fled to Atma, a town in Idlib province close to the Turkish border, where a cluster of displacement camps were emerging. He would be there for the next 12 years. 

He married there in 2015, and became a father to three children whose bedtime stories were tales of Tremseh, with its clear springs and green canopies heavy with fruit. 

“It was a dream to return,” al-Jassem says. “We kept our memories [of Tremseh] alive, where we were children, remembering its streets with the hope of returning, the hope of victory.”

‘What’s this, baba?’ 

On New Year’s Day, less than a month after the regime fell, al-Jassem and his family found their way back to Tremseh. His children now play in Tremseh’s orchards and beside its fish pond. 

They are seeing many animals and plants for the first time, al-Jassem says, after growing up in a displacement camp devoid of vegetation and wildlife. 

“They were surprised by the water, the trees, the fish… They had never seen these things, in all their lives,” the father says. ‘They ask: ‘What’s this baba?’… ‘This is a plum, this is a fish,’ I reply.” 

Al-Jassem, who recently became Tremseh’s new mayor, says nearly 20,000 people have returned—the population swelling as many residents returned with new families and children. 

The UN Agency for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated in mid-June that around 1.2 million internally displaced Syrians and 577,266 living abroad had returned to their homes since Assad’s downfall. 

Louay Sutel (left) and Bassam al-Jassem (center) enjoy mate and home-grown cantaloupe with their neighbors in Tremseh, 19/7/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

Breaking ‘barriers of fear’ 

Many who returned to Tremseh came from the Atma camps, like al-Jassem, but others found their way back from elsewhere in Syria, and even abroad. Some made contact with old neighbors and friends for the first time in a decade, finally attempting to bridge their pasts.

Al-Jassem’s close friend, 40-year-old Louay Sutel, was one of just 1,500 people who remained in Tremseh after the 2012 massacre. Between puffs of his cigarette in the cool room, he tells his friends what Tremseh was like under the regime’s tight watch. 

For 12 years, it was too dangerous to contact al-Jassem, or any of his other friends and relatives in Atma. “If the [regime’s] security knew they contacted me, they would take me to prison and torture me, or I may have been killed,” Sutel says. 

He still finds it difficult to speak freely. “The fear is still planted inside us. Before, if you spoke, you would either be imprisoned or killed,” he says. 

Sutel is now working with al-Jassem in the municipal office in Tremseh. Al-Jassem chimes in that Sutel is still hesitant at times when speaking to government officials. He has noticed the fear his friend still holds. 

“There is a big difference between us [who left Tremseh] and them [who stayed],” al-Jassem says. In Atma, “living conditions were difficult, but we were living in dignity and freedom. I could move around where I wanted, or express what I want,” he continues. “Here, they couldn’t. They were enslaved and afraid.” 

“We’re teaching them slowly, to break these barriers of fear,” he adds, turning toward Sutel.

Old scars 

Memories of the 2012 massacre, as well as the executions and other crimes committed by the shabiha, are engraved in the villagers’ memories—and the scars remain on nearly every street corner. 

Some who returned to Tremseh found their homes and shops looted in their absence. Al-Jassem’s friend, Mamdouh al-Satouf, 50, found his home broken into when he returned in March. 

“The shabiha came and took everything: the window panes, the electricity cables,” he tells Syria Direct. In northern Hama and southern Idlib, years of systematic looting operations stripped anything of material value from buildings in many communities.

Al-Satouf’s childhood home stands a few minutes down the road from his own house. In the backyard, a cement building is still charred, riddled with bullet holes.

His cousin, Muhammad, was a doctor. During the 2012 massacre, he rushed victims to the building, which served as makeshift hospital with the village under siege. However, it was attacked by Assad’s forces, killing some of the wounded inside.

Muhammad was also arrested and taken to Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison, along with about 200 others from the village, al-Satouf says. He, like the others, has not been heard from since.

‘A new page’

Al-Jassem says that Tremseh’s villagers have “opened a new page”, as they attempt to heal from the events of the past. “We don’t care for revenge,” he states.  

Elsewhere in Hama province—not far from Tremseh—mass attacks have been carried out against Alawite villages blamed for atrocities committed under the Assad regime. 

A fact-finding committee formed by the new Syrian authorities found that over 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed in several days of violence centered in Syria’s Alawite-majority coastal regions earlier this year—incidents they said were driven, in part, by “revenge.” 

According to a UN probe into the Tremseh massacre, regime forces and shabiha received “support” from the neighboring Alawite villages.

However, al-Jassem hopes to leave the past behind, and focus on rebuilding. “What we can do for now is focus on services,” he says. “When we returned to the town we found it destroyed: its schools, healthcare and infrastructure. We need good services for our children.” 

Tremseh has not received help from any international or local organizations, so addressing large, and expensive, infrastructure projects—like the village’s devastated sewage system—is more difficult now, al-Jassem says. 

They are starting with what they can do as a community—pooling money to buy a new water tank and feeding troughs, or donating bread to those in need. “The money is not here,” he says, “so most of what we’re doing to help is shared between our neighbors.” 

“If you plant food for the people, you reap a good harvest,” al-Jassem says, smiling. 

‘It’s very nice, but there is a lot of pressure’

In al-Jassem’s home in Tremseh’s historic neighborhood, his wife, 23-year-old Marwa Nasser al-Ahmad and her two sisters-in-law chat over a plate of fresh green grapes, just plucked from vines stretched over their courtyard. 

Their furniture and belongings are piled high in the small room, much of which is still unpacked. “It’s very nice [to return], but there is a lot of pressure,” al-Ahmad tells Syria Direct. 

Ten people—her family, and their three children, and al-Jassem’s brother, wife, and his children—are all living in two small rooms. “Tremseh is a small place. This house is smaller than in the camp,” she says, peering around the room. 

Al-Jassem’s sister makes mate in their home in Tremseh’s historic neighborhood, 19/7/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

Still, al-Ahmad adds that the situation in Tremseh is much better than in some of the surrounding villages, which bore notably more destruction. 

While over a million Syrians have returned, this is only a fraction of more than 13 million who were displaced during the war. Many are still deterred by a lack of available housing and basic services. 

Ahmad’s family is from al-Hamamiyat, also in Syria’s Hama governorate, which was completely leveled in the fighting. Her parents returned after the regime fell, but are still living in a tent set atop the foundation of their destroyed home. 

Syria Direct visited a few of Ahmad’s relatives in al-Hamamiyat, also still living in tents. “Here there is nothing—no water or anything else,” Ahmad’s aunt, Saham al-Ahmad al-Zaidi, 50, tells Syria Direct. 

“But here, this is our village, our home,” she says, walking across what was once her living room, its orange tile floor still visible amid the rubble. 

Ahmad’s family stands on the rubble of their destroyed home in al-Hamamiyat, 19/7/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

‘We laid the bodies down’

Back in Tremseh, al-Jassem and his friends leave the cool home and make their way to a graveyard overlooking the village. Slowly, they walk down one row of gravestones, where victims of the massacre were hastily buried before the villagers fled. 

They speak about friends buried in the dry earth. Monsef Faisal was a doctor, Sutel says, and Yousef al-Obaid was 75 years old when he was killed, his body thrown into a nearby riverbed. 

The bodies were wrapped in plastic rather than a cloth shroud, Sutel adds. There was no time to carry out the usual Islamic burial rituals. 

The trauma the town endured casts a shadow, but al-Jassem believes it also knit its residents closer together. “We laid the bodies down in one place. The entire town headed to the cemetery and everyone was weeping…our children, our women,” he recounts.

“Our community already had a strong bond and cohesion,” he says. “The massacre only strengthened that.” 

The gravestones of Monseef Faseel and Yousef al-Obaid, killed on July 12, 2012, 19/7/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)

Tea and conversation 

As the sun sets and the temperature cools, villagers emerge from their homes, gathering under Tremseh’s trees. They laugh, eat plums and peaches, and sip on mate sweetened with fresh honey. Children run barefoot through the fields, while an older man tends his beehives. 

A group of young men chat together. One has returned from Turkey, another from Lebanon and another from Ghana. 

Sitting nearby, al-Jassem and his friends tell stories of village soccer matches, played between Tremseh and neighboring villages in the years before the war. Al-Jassem, who was once a soccer player, remembers the parade of cars that would head to the field, honking their horns and cheering loudly. 

They friends keep talking into the early hours of the morning, energized by tea and conversation—and by each others’ company after so many years apart. 

Neighbors in Tremseh gather under fruit trees in the evening, 19/7/2025 (Hanna Davis/ Syria Direct)