Syria marks a yr since Assad fled, however struggles to heal

HOMS, Syria — A yr in the past, Mohammad Marwan discovered himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s infamous Saydnaya jail on the outskirts of Damascus as insurgent forces pushing towards the capital threw open its doorways to launch the prisoners.

Arrested in 2018 for fleeing obligatory navy service, the daddy of three had cycled by way of 4 different lockups earlier than touchdown in Saydnaya, a sprawling complicated simply north of Damascus that grew to become synonymous with among the worst atrocities dedicated beneath the rule of now-ousted President Bashar Assad.

He recalled guards ready to welcome new prisoners with a gauntlet of beatings and electrical shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body,'” Marwan stated.

His Dec. 8, 2024, homecoming to a home stuffed with family and mates in his village in Homs province was joyful.

However within the yr since then, he has struggled to beat the bodily and psychological results of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest ache and issue respiration that turned out to be the results of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiousness and issue sleeping.

He is now present process therapy for tuberculosis and attending remedy periods at a middle in Homs targeted on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan stated his bodily and psychological conditions have steadily improved.

“We were in something like a state of death” in Saydnaya, he stated. “Now we’ve come back to life.”

A rustic struggling to heal

On Monday, hundreds of Syrians took to the streets to rejoice the anniversary of Assad’s fall.

Like Marwan, the nation is struggling to heal a yr after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign got here to an finish following 14 years of civil warfare that left an estimated half 1,000,000 individuals useless, thousands and thousands extra displaced, and the nation battered and divided.

Assad’s downfall got here as a shock, even to the insurgents who unseated him. In late November 2024, teams within the nation’s northwest — led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist insurgent group whose then-leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, is now the nation’s interim president — launched an offensive on the town of Aleppo, aiming to take it again from Assad’s forces.

They have been startled when the Syrian military collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo, then the important thing cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the street to Damascus open. In the meantime, rebel teams within the nation’s south mobilized to make their very own push towards the capital.

The rebels took Damascus on Dec. 8 whereas Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and stays in exile in Moscow. However Russia, a longtime Assad ally, didn’t intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the nation’s new rulers and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.

Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Protection, stated HTS and its allies had launched a serious organizational overhaul after Assad’s forces regained management of quite a few previously rebel-controlled areas in 2019 and 2020.

The insurgent offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed toward seizing Damascus however was meant to preempt an anticipated main offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib desiring to “finish the Idlib file,” Abdul Ghani stated.

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

In timing the assault, the insurgents additionally took benefit of the truth that Russia was distracted by its warfare in Ukraine and that the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, one other Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a harmful warfare with Israel.

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

Successes overseas, challenges at dwelling

Since his sudden ascent to energy, al-Sharaa has launched a diplomatic appeal offensive, constructing ties with Western and Arab nations that shunned Assad and that after thought-about al-Sharaa a terrorist.

In November, he grew to become the primary Syrian president for the reason that nation’s independence in 1946 to go to Washington.

In a speech in Damascus on Monday, al-Sharaa described his imaginative and prescient of Syria as “a strong country that belongs to its ancient past, looks forward to a promising future and is restoring its natural position in its Arab, regional and international environment” and can be part of “the ranks of the most advanced nations.”

However the diplomatic successes have been offset by outbreaks of sectarian violence through which tons of of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities have been killed by pro-government Sunni fighters. Native Druze teams have now arrange their very own de facto authorities and navy within the southern Sweida province.

There are ongoing tensions between the brand new authorities in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the nation’s northeast, regardless of an settlement inked in March that was presupposed to result in a merger of their forces.

Israel is cautious of Syria’s new Islamist-led authorities despite the fact that al-Sharaa has stated he desires no battle with the nation. Israel has seized a previously U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched common airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a safety settlement have stalled.

Remnants of the civil warfare are all over the place. The Mines Advisory Group reported Monday that at the very least 590 individuals have been killed by landmines in Syria since Assad’s fall, together with 167 kids, placing the nation on observe to file the world’s highest landmine casualty price in 2025.

In the meantime, the economic system has remained sluggish, regardless of the lifting of most Western sanctions. Whereas Gulf nations have promised to spend money on reconstruction tasks, little has materialized on the bottom. The World Financial institution estimates that rebuilding the nation’s war-damaged areas will value $216 billion.

Rebuilding largely a person effort

The rebuilding that has taken place has largely been particular person house owners paying to repair their very own broken homes and companies.

On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp right now largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a sequence of militant teams then bombarded by authorities planes, the camp was all however deserted after 2018.

Since Assad’s fall, a gentle stream of former residents have come again.

Essentially the most broken areas stay largely abandoned however on the primary avenue main into the camp, little by little, blasted-out partitions have been changed within the buildings that stay structurally sound. Outlets have reopened and households have come again to their residences. However any bigger reconstruction initiative seems to nonetheless be far off.

“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I would hope they could remove the old destroyed houses and build towers,” stated Maher al-Homsi, who’s fixing his broken dwelling to maneuver again, though the world does not also have a water connection.

His neighbor, Etab al-Hawari, was keen to chop the brand new authorities some slack.

“They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed,” she stated.

Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist from Damascus, stated of the nation after Assad’s fall, “Of course it’s better, there’s freedom of some sort.”

However he stays anxious concerning the precarious safety scenario and its financial impacts.

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

The U.N refugee company stories that greater than 1 million refugees and almost 2 million internally displaced Syrians have returned to their houses since Assad’s fall. However with out jobs and reconstruction, some will depart once more.

Amongst them is Marwan, the previous prisoner, who says the post-Assad scenario in Syria is “far better” than earlier than. However he’s struggling economically.

Generally he picks up labor that pays solely 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian kilos every day, the equal of about $5.

As soon as he finishes his tuberculosis therapy, he stated, he plans to depart to Lebanon searching for better-paid work.