International flights return to Damascus airport after Assad’s fall

# International flights return to Damascus airport after Assad’s fall

*Event date: 2025-01-07*

International flights resumed at Damascus airport for the first time since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, marking one of the clearest signs that Syria’s aviation system is opening again after years of disruption. The first incoming flight was a Qatar Airways service, and a Syrian Airlines aircraft also departed for Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates on the same day.

The return of scheduled international traffic is important not only for transport but also for the political symbolism around the airport. AFP journalists at the terminal described crowds greeting arrivals with balloons, flowers and cheers, while some passengers kissed the ground. Damascus airport director Anis Fallouh called the day a new beginning, and the scene reflected the sense that a closed-off route had been reopened to ordinary travel.

The first Qatar Airways flight to land in nearly 13 years is the most concrete sign of the shift. Qatar Airways announced three weekly flights to Damascus, and the airport was also seeing the return of other international links that had been absent during the war years. The source says aid aircraft and diplomatic delegations had already begun landing earlier, and domestic flights had resumed before the international service restarted.

That distinction matters. The airport was not simply switching from closed to open in one step; it had already been handling limited traffic. But the arrival of a scheduled commercial airline flight gives the reopening a different weight. It signals that passenger traffic, not just humanitarian or diplomatic movement, is returning to the capital’s main airport.

The atmosphere in the terminal also underlined how long people had waited for the moment. One passenger said she had been fearful the airport would remain shut as her visa expired, while another described waiting for a brother she had not seen in 17 years. Those individual accounts show the practical stakes behind the reopening: aviation restoration is about reunions, paperwork, commerce and the possibility of normal travel, not just aviation infrastructure.

The evidence in this packet does not say how quickly Damascus airport can scale up or what other foreign carriers will follow. But it does show a major milestone: the resumption of international flights after a long hiatus. For Syria’s new authorities, that makes the airport a visible sign of control and recovery. For passengers, it is a route back into and out of the country that had disappeared with the war.

The airport’s reopening also suggests that Syria’s new authorities are trying to normalize travel as quickly as possible. The source says Qatar Airways has resumed flights and that a Syrian plane headed to Sharjah carried passengers under the new independence flag, which gives the moment political as well as practical meaning. It remains unclear how quickly the route network will expand, but the return of scheduled international service is a concrete step away from the isolation that defined the airport under Assad.

The airport scene made that shift visible. Syrians greeted passengers with balloons and flowers, and some arriving travelers knelt to kiss the ground, a sign of how emotionally loaded the reopening was after years of isolation. The source also says the first incoming flight was from Qatar Airways, which had not flown to Damascus in nearly 13 years. That makes the day less a routine schedule change than a public marker of a reopened country.