One year after the fall of al-Assad, a reporter returns to Damascus

Damascus, Syria – On the morning of December 5, 2025, a taxi drove me across the Lebanon-Syria border. This time was different from my first trip across, in the early hours of December 9, 2024, just a day after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria for Moscow.

On that day, Syrian Army military vehicles were abandoned on the side of the highway to Damascus. Also abandoned, scattered along the highway’s shoulders, were the uniforms of the men who had once driven them.

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A year later, they’re all gone. So, too, are the defaced portraits of Bashar and his father Hafez, who ruled the country from 1971 until last year. And gone is a sign I’d photographed a year earlier that read “Assad’s Syria welcomes you”.

A photograph of a sign reading ‘Assad’s Syria welcomes you’, taken on December 9, 2024, the day after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria for Moscow [Justin Salhani/Al Jazeera]

I was back in Damascus to cover the first anniversary of the fall of the regime. A year later, people return to Umayyad Square to celebrate.

This time, armed men are organising the crowds instead of firing their rifles into the air. The muddied SUVs that transported anti-Assad forces into Damascus have been replaced by new security forces vehicles, emblazoned with the new national emblem adopted by Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government.

A lot can change in a year. Immediately after the fall, Syrians had a five-decade weight removed from their chests. It had pressed down on their ribs and organs and robbed them of feelings of agency.

‘May God protect the government’

For years, many Syrians – even in the diaspora – avoided giving their real names or having their photos taken out of fear of repercussions for themselves or loved ones back in Syria.

After al-Assad’s fall, many Syrians were eager to express the suppressed thoughts they’d long burrowed away.

In Umayyad Square, even though the anniversary was still three days away, people gathered and waved flags and lit fireworks. Many spoke of their joy at the upcoming celebration.

“The situation is good, may God protect the government,” said Moataz, a 19-year-old student. “The situation in the last year changed … in every way.”

We finished speaking, and I began talking to another student. Then, Moataz approached me and asked me to please not include his family name in the report.

Another of his friends refused to be interviewed. Nothing was wrong, they said, they just felt more comfortable that way.

Standing next to me was a Canadian colleague. When Moataz’s friend heard he was from Canada, he told him that Syria was good to visit for a week or two, but that it’s better to live in Canada.

Most in the square had only ever known one family’s rule. Many, under the age of 25, had only known one man’s rule. Exorcising the trauma and demons, especially those of the years of the uprising and violent suppression, will understandably take time. So will improving the country and its infrastructure.

Syrian shop owners I spoke to in the al-Salhiye and al-Hamadiyeh souqs told me that they no longer feared security forces would raid their shops, but that business had largely still not improved. Hopes are high that the lifting of United States sanctions, including the recent repeal of the Caesar Act, might kick-start the economy. But for now, many are living day-to-day or off remittances.

A street artist in the al-Salhiye souk in Damascus [Justin Salhani/Al Jazeera]

The disappeared

One criticism from activists is that little progress has been made on the issue of the tens of thousands of disappeared Syrians. Portraits of missing persons posted in Damascus’s Marjeh Square were torn down.

A year earlier, my colleagues and I had driven towards Sednaya prison north of the city. We parked a couple of kilometres away, as Israeli air strikes exploded in the distance, and carried on by foot towards the prison.

There, we found tens of thousands of people looking for any sign, whisper or remnant of their loved ones who had been disappeared in the nefarious Syrian prison network built by the Assad regime over decades. On our way down from the prison, people arriving asked us if there were any prisoners left inside. They did not yet know that all the remaining prisoners had been liberated and that rumours of an underground holding cell were proof of the depths of creative depravity the regime was capable of.

That regime is gone. And nobody I spoke to in Damascus wants al-Assad back. That fact alone has made a world of difference to millions of Syrians. However, discussions with shop owners, servers at cafes, a former hotel employee, former prisoners, researchers, students, engineers, taxi drivers and members of the diaspora considering returning home, also highlighted that it will not be enough to rebuild the country.

The World Bank estimates reconstruction in Syria needs $216bn. Dozens of areas still lie in ashes and rubble. The economy has yet to take off, and the pledges of financial and political support from international and regional allies have not fully materialised yet.

A year on from al-Assad’s fall, some streets are being repaved, gunmen in mismatched fatigues who once roamed the city streets have been replaced by men in matching black uniforms with state insignia. An official sheen has been laid over Damascus. Many locals may match that sheen with their own expressions of joy, but underneath, many are still struggling.

To come home or not to come home?

Syria is still in a post-war phase.

While locals said electricity and infrastructure are improving, walking through unlit streets or alleys is still not uncommon. While visiting a friend in the Muhajreen neighbourhood, he looked at the clock. “The electricity hasn’t come yet today,” he said. “We’ve been getting two hours on and four hours off.”

Of course, few people in Damascus miss the days of al-Assad. His mere absence has opened up the possibility of return for thousands of Syrians.

Many feel there is an opportunity to help rebuild and reshape the country.

About three million Syrians have reportedly returned to the country in the last year. I met a handful during my short trip.

Omran, 22, moved back a week ago from Lebanon, where he worked installing solar panels after not seeing his mother or little brother for close to a decade.

Abu Taj, 24, came back after 10 years in Saudi Arabia and hopes his family will soon follow. At a dinner near Bab Sharqi, a group energetically discussed the last year, the changes they wanted to see and how they might be part of shaping it.

A Syrian-Palestinian researcher who had moved back from Lebanon a few months earlier had her criticisms but felt contagiously optimistic about the direction the country was going in.

Others, Syrians living abroad in London, Amman or Istanbul, said they were considering moving back as well. For them, there is finally hope.

End the culture of impunity

On December 9, 2024, I visited a villa used by the al-Assads to host guests. In front of the villa was a neatly curated row of fruit trees, bearing kumquats.

As locals filtered in and out of the ransacked villa, visiting a location that had previously been off-limits to the public, a man wearing a leather jacket picked kumquats off the trees and sucked the juice from them. He projected his voice for all around to hear, “How sweet this is!”

He could have been talking about the fruit or the moment in history.

On that day, and for months afterwards, it was common to see men in a variety of colours and patterns of fatigues, patrolling the city or manning checkpoints.

Today, they’ve been replaced by men in standardised black uniforms. People are no longer jumping up and down, hugging them and celebrating with them. But in Damascus at least, people didn’t visibly fear them in public.

Of course, the past year has also included a variety of lived experiences, including some that are dark.

Widespread violence and massacres on the coast in March and in Suwayda in July have left many minorities distrustful of authorities. In earlier trips around the country, including to Suwayda for a day in February 2025, I found many Syrians from minority backgrounds sceptical of Ahmed al-Sharaa and his new government. But many expressed a sense of hope that actions about minority rights and dignity would match the words from the new leadership and its followers.

In fact, many expressed frustration about talk in Europe and elsewhere about the protection of minorities. At an upscale restaurant in the Abou Roummaneh neighbourhood in Damascus, a lawyer told me he was angered by a conservative French newspaper after it discussed his views on the political situation and called him a “Christian lawyer”.

On my latest trip, however, I found much of that goodwill from the minorities I spoke with had faded. That was true in Damascus and elsewhere.

“I don’t think people understand how badly the massacres in Suwayda affected people there,” one non-Syrian who regularly visits the region for work told me.

Last year, I wrote a reporter’s notebook after a trip to Damascus and Aleppo in December. In it, I expressed scepticism over the Western obsession with minority rights when they had so clearly ignored that under al-Assad, and that the only universalism was the ability to be imprisoned, tortured or disappeared.

“The concerns of minorities are real and not to be dismissed, but I also hope a focus on a particular minority group does not overshadow or dismiss the wider struggle for universal rights that thousands of Syrians are demanding across sects and regions,” I wrote at that time.

The relief that al-Assad is gone is still present. But that struggle for universal rights, for minorities and for the majority, still has a mountain to climb.

On my second day in Damascus, I received a voice note from Razan Rashidi, executive director of The Syria Campaign. Rashidi and her colleagues are leading a campaign to bring al-Assad back from Moscow to face a Syrian-led special court.

“After one year of the fall of the Assad regime as human rights campaigner and a person who worked for so long for many years with survivors of many atrocities inside Syria, I’ve personally witnessed stages and how the regime used aid to starve civilians, worked with chemical weapons survivors, worked with families of the missing. And it’s very heartbreaking to know that Assad is living and enjoying freedom in Moscow and many of his officials,” she told me.

“And what we’ve seen in the past year in terms of the culture of impunity in different parts of Syria, whether for perpetrators who film themselves when they’re committing the crimes or the denials of many of the crimes that we’ve seen as well inside Syria, it makes us more committed and our belief in the need for justice and accountability is even deepened, knowing that only justice can bring peace to this country that is trying to rebuild and revive after years of atrocities.”