A New Era Begins In Syria After Toppling Of Assad Regime
TABLE OF CONTENTS
On December 8, 2024, the lightning offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al‑Sham (HTS) culminated with the largely bloodless capture of Syria’s capital, Damascus, and the toppling of the regime of Bashar al‑Assad, who fled the country for Moscow. The fall of the Assad government marked a new chapter for Syria, which had been mired in a multi‑party civil war since 2011, sparked by the Arab Spring uprisings.
The weeks after December 8 saw Syrians navigating their newfound freedom, not only in expressions of jubilation in the capital’s Umayyad Square, but in the more sobering work of families looking for evidence of their missing loved ones who had been imprisoned by the deposed regime. Missing posters blanketed walls in city squares, and people scoured documents in Sednaya Prison and other notorious facilities whose doors were flung open after December 8. Some families received the grim confirmation of their loved ones’ fate when they discovered their remains in prison morgues.
One such family was that of the activist Mazen al‑Hamada, whose body was found at Sednaya prison, where it is assumed he was killed shortly before the prison's liberation and the collapse of the Assad regime. Hamada was detained and tortured during the uprising of 2011 and released in 2013, when he received asylum in the Netherlands. In a development that confused friends and family, he returned to Syria in 2020 and disappeared soon after. When a funeral was held for Hamada on December 12, hundreds of people joined in the procession, many carrying pictures of their own missing relatives.
Other families were confronting a different kind of loss, returning to their destroyed homes in parts of the country devastated by the war. Jobar, on the outskirts of Damascus, was a frequent battleground in the country’s civil war, and today much of it lies in ruins, including the cemetery in its Old City. In the weeks after December 8, relatives would gather daily at the cemetery to try to locate their relatives’ graves and rebuild them, putting together broken head stones and marking the grave with a number so they can locate it.
Displaced people began to return in droves to areas around Damascus, both from other parts of Syria and nearby countries like Turkey and Lebanon. Ahmed Muhammad Al‑Nawa was one such refugee, who returned to his village in the Ghouta region east of Damascus, for the first time in 10 years. Ahmed, 36, says that he was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for a year and half in the Mezzah Military Prison in 2012 and 2013. After his release, he fled to Lebanon with his wife and daughter, where they had been living in a tent in the Hosh Hareem camp for the past decade. Ahmed’s mother Umm Marwan stayed behind in Syria due to a heart condition that stopped her from travelling. While living in Lebanon, Ahmed and his wife had four more children that were born in Lebanon and have never meet their grandmother, other relatives, or seen the family home. After the fall of the regime, Ahmed decided to return home, bringing all his possessions from Lebanon and giving his mother the chance to meet her grandchildren face‑to‑face for the first time.
For all the promise of Syria’s new chapter, it remains largely unwritten, as the ruling rebel coalition – led by a group still designated as a terrorist organization by the US and other foreign countries – forms a new government and tries to signal its legitimacy to audiences both domestic and foreign. In the wake of December 8, down came portraits and statues and other symbols of the Assad regime, including the two‑starred Syrian flag used during Ba’athist rule since 1980. In its place, up went the three‑starred Independence Flag, hung from state buildings, painted into murals, and fluttering in the crowds that gathered in Umayyad Square. Many such flags being waved in December were also emblazoned with a word in English ‑ “Freedom” ‑ a sign that Syrians and their new leaders knew that the world was watching, and an acknowledgment that the actions of foreign powers ‑ from Turkey to Russia to the United States ‑ would be pivotal in influencing the country's new course.