The Jaber Border Crossing was in controlled chaos on Dec. 9 — the morning after Bashar Assad’s ouster as Syria’s president — as Jordanian authorities allowed Syrians with vehicles to return home. The air pulsed with optimism, but that joy was dulled by decades of torment and separation. Each time the gates opened, Syrian families and lone travelers surged forward, laden with as much of their lives as they could carry. Bags were strapped to bodies, cars piled high with belongings. Some of those people were setting foot on Syrian soil for the first time in years.
I remember the cold cutting through me that morning, though adrenaline kept us moving. By the first hour, my assignment partner, the incredible reporter Jude Taha, and I had our jackets tied at our waists and were running from person to person, listening to their stories. The faces at the border could have been our own relatives, so familiar were their features. As a photojournalist, my role was twofold: first, to document the reality of the border, the displacement and homecoming of Syrians, and second, to do so with care, humility, and diligence. We carried bags and suitcases, lent our phones, shared meals, and sat beside them on the concrete. What mattered most to me was forming connections.
One moment in particular stayed with me. A Syria-registered car had just been cleared to cross. Officers barked orders, and people scrambled to share tearful kisses and gather their belongings. A girl sat quietly in the back seat of a white car, surrounded by women. Everyone around the car was in motion, packing, shouting over the growling engine, over the foreign reporters, taxi drivers, and officers adding to the din.
The girl chose to hold my gaze, and in that instant became the anchor of my photograph. I wondered if she knew I was taking her picture. I hoped she understood how deeply I felt for her.
Photographing her demanded everything I had: mind, body, and instinct. The mechanics of photography — light, composition, color — felt secondary to the weight of her expression. I prefer manual focus for its deliberate nature, so I adjusted the focus, framing the image around her eyes, her little face, filtering out the surrounding commotion. It was the only way to capture what she already knew: that she was crossing into a home she had never known, and that she wasn’t afraid.
Later, a man approached us, his voice soft and tentative. “Do you have time to listen to me?”
We nodded. His name was Baron Khlaif. He wanted to return to Syria to search for his father, missing since the early years of the civil war. He carefully pulled out a small, worn bundle: photographs of his father and his family, their edges curled and yellowed by time; torn, empty envelopes that once held Baron’s Syrian identity card and passport, now confiscated — a barrier to entry; and letters and a journal, each a fragile thread connecting him to the life he was trying to reclaim.
I asked if I could photograph his keepsakes, and he readily agreed, eager to share his story, or what he had left of it. The sanctity of the moment touched me. Those were lifetimes held in his hands. The shot felt intrusive, so I was especially careful. I wanted the colors to speak this time, so I kept much of the faces he was showing out of focus. The reds resonated with me. I felt they represented his courage, his heart, and his longing for home.
It was his second attempt to enter through the gate. Despite his threadbare clothing and lack of documents, his faith in his father’s survival shone through.
“I know he’s alive,” Baron said. “No one knows this but [me and] God.” As he spoke, I made a point of capturing his heartbreak in the next shot. I shifted from photo to video and back again, zeroing in on his face, his expressions. The angle was crucial to me; I wanted a high vantage point to convey the vulnerability of the moment, but I was careful not to hover over him entirely, out of respect.
For Jude and me, humanizing these stories was paramount. These people — exhausted, displaced, carrying their lives in plastic bags — deserved to be seen as more than statistics. Our own histories made it personal, too: Jude, as a Palestinian, and I, part Circassian and part Syrian. We knew what it meant to be away from your homeland. In their faces, in those fleeting moments, we saw reflections of ourselves.
