“I am experiencing these events with a lot of emotion,” confides the last French ambassador to Syria

In March 2012, the French authorities decided to close the French embassy in Damascus due to the Syrian civil war.

“I am experiencing these events with a lot of emotion.“, declared Monday evening, December 9, on franceinfo, the last French ambassador to Syria between 2009 and 2012, Eric Chevalier, current French ambassador to Egypt, the day after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the capture of power by rebel troops led by Islamists.

“I experience these events with a lot of emotion because I remember very well the faces, the voices, the people I met, some of whom are no longer here today.“, said Eric Chevalier, before confiding “obviously think of these hundreds of thousands of deaths, of these more than 10 million people who had to leave their homes“.

In March 2012, the French authorities decided to close the French embassy in Damascus due to the Syrian civil war. “When we closed the embassy, ​​it was an extremely powerful moment, when we were forced to leave local teams“, he says. “These Syrians that we left, it was a moment of heartbreak, with a lot of worry at the time about what I feared about the continuation of events, which was what everyone knows“.

Asked to look back on the eight days that have just passed, culminating in the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Eric Chevalier evokes a “historic moment which, to be frank, surprised everyone“. “I think everyone was very surprised at the speed of events over the past eight days“, he adds.

According to him, there is now “full of questions“on what will happen next in the country:”It is up to the Syrians to build it. (…) We need caution, but we need hope. It will obviously not be easy to support this movement, but it is up to Syrians first to build this path.“, he concluded.