Syria marks 1 year after Assad, but struggles to heal : NPR

Army helicopters fly over Damascus, Syria, on Monday during a parade by the new Syrian army marking the first anniversary of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Ghaith Alsayed/AP

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HOMS, Syria — A year ago, Mohammad Marwan stood barefoot and dazed outside Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus, as rebel forces heading toward the capital opened its gates to free prisoners.

Arrested in 2018 for fleeing mandatory military service, the father of three passed through four other prisons before landing at Saydnaya, a sprawling compound just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now-deposed President Bashar Assad.

He remembers guards waiting to receive new prisoners under a series of beatings and electric shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we don’t call an ambulance unless we have a dead body,'” Marwan said.

Former detainee Mohammad Marwan walks down a street towards the Homs recovery center in the village of Tell Dahab in rural Homs, Syria, December 2.

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His return on December 8, 2024, to a house full of relatives and friends, in his village in the province of Homs, was joyful.

But over the next year, he struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six years of imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing which turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was plagued by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.

He is currently undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and is undergoing therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners. Marwan said his physical and mental situation had gradually improved.

“We were in a state close to death” in Saydnaya, he said. “Now we have come back to life.”

A country struggling to heal

On Monday, thousands of Syrians took to the streets to mark the anniversary of Assad’s fall.

Like Marwan, the country is struggling to recover a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year rule ended, following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million dead, millions displaced and the country battered and divided.

Assad’s fall was a shock, even to the insurgents who toppled him. In late November 2024, groups in the northwest of the country – led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group whose then-leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, is now the country’s interim president – ​​launched an offensive on the city of Aleppo, with the aim of retaking it from Assad’s forces.

They were surprised when the Syrian army collapsed without much resistance, first in Aleppo, then in the key cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open. Meanwhile, insurgent groups from the south of the country have mobilized to launch their own offensive towards the capital.

Rebels captured Damascus on December 8 while Assad was taken away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow. But Russia, a longtime ally of Assad, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country’s new leaders and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.

Hassan Abdul Ghani, a spokesman for the Syrian Defense Ministry, said HTS and its allies launched a major organizational overhaul after Assad’s forces regained control of a number of areas formerly controlled by rebels in 2019 and 2020.

The November 2024 rebel offensive was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus, but to preempt an expected major offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib, with the aim of “finishing the Idlib file”, Abdul Ghani said.

Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the battle radius and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas”, he said.

In planning the attack, the insurgents also took advantage of the fact that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and that the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, backed by Iran, another Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a devastating war with Israel.

When the Syrian army’s defenses collapsed, the rebels pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity,” Abdul Ghani said.

Successes abroad, challenges at home

Since his sudden rise to power, al-Sharaa has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, building ties with Western and Arab countries that shunned Assad and once viewed al-Sharaa as a terrorist.

In November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.

In a speech in Damascus on Monday, al-Sharaa described his vision of Syria as “a strong country that belongs to its ancient past, looks forward to a promising future and restores its natural position in its Arab, regional and international environment” and will join “the ranks of the most advanced nations.”

But diplomatic successes have been offset by outbreaks of sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities have been killed by pro-government Sunni fighters. Local Druze groups have now established their own de facto government and army in the southern province of Sweida.

Tensions persist between the new government in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the country’s northeast, despite a deal signed in March that was supposed to lead to a merger of their forces.

A boy checks military equipment as visitors tour the “Syrian Revolution Military Exhibition”, which opened last week to mark the first anniversary of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus, Syria, on Sunday.

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Israel is wary of Syria’s new Islamist-led government, although al-Sharaa has said it does not want conflict with the country. Israel seized a formerly UN-monitored buffer zone in southern Syria and has launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.

Remnants of the Civil War are everywhere. The Mines Advisory Group reported Monday that at least 590 people have been killed by landmines in Syria since the fall of Assad, including 167 children, putting the country on track to record the highest landmine casualty rate in the world in 2025.

Meanwhile, the economy has remained sluggish, despite the lifting of most Western sanctions. While Gulf countries have promised to invest in reconstruction projects, little has materialized on the ground. The World Bank estimates that rebuilding war-damaged areas will cost $216 billion.

Rebuilding largely an individual effort

The rebuilding that has taken place has largely been the work of individual homeowners paying to repair their own damaged homes and businesses.

On the outskirts of Damascus, the once bustling Palestinian camp of Yarmouk now largely resembles a lunar landscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups and then bombed by government planes, the camp was virtually abandoned after 2018.

Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have returned.

The most damaged areas remain largely deserted, but on the main street leading to the camp, walls destroyed by explosions have been gradually replaced in buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have returned to their apartments. But any larger-scale reconstruction initiative still seems far away.

“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I hope they can demolish the old destroyed houses and build towers,” said Maher al-Homsi, who is repairing his damaged house to return, even though the area does not even have a water connection.

Its neighbor, Etab al-Hawari, was ready to give the new authorities some breathing space.

“They inherited an empty country: the banks are empty, the infrastructure has been looted, the houses have been looted,” she said.

Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist in Damascus, said of the country after Assad’s fall: “Of course it’s better, there is a kind of freedom.”

But he remains worried about the precarious security situation and its economic impacts.

“The job of the state is to impose security, and once you impose security, everything else will come,” he said. “The security situation is what encourages investors to come and carry out projects.”

The United Nations refugee agency reports that more than a million refugees and nearly two million internally displaced Syrians have returned home since Assad’s fall. But without jobs and without reconstruction, some will leave.

Among them is Marwan, the former prisoner, who says the situation in post-Assad Syria is “much better” than before. But he is experiencing economic difficulties.

Sometimes he chooses a workforce that earns only 50,000 to 60,000 Syrian pounds a day, the equivalent of about $5.

Once he finishes treatment for tuberculosis, he said, he plans to move to Lebanon in search of better-paid work.