I was still asleep in Doha when the news broke on the morning of Dec. 8, 2024. The regime of Bashar al-Assad had finally fallen. The euphoria I felt in that first minute has never really left. It still feels like a dream even a year later to the date.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Like millions of Syrians in the diaspora, I had resigned myself to the idea that I may never see my birth country without Assad in charge. But an 11-day rebel offensive led by Ahmed al-Sharaa changed all of that.
More optimistic Syrians had faith the regime would be toppled eventually, not by the current generation that rose up against it, but a future one. This regime, they believed, could not rule forever. This regime, they hoped, might outlive them, but not their children. The revolution might be defeated temporarily but would not die.
For years, I had assumed that my life outside Syria was temporary, that going back after studying and building a career abroad was just what would happen. I had often prayed about living long enough to sit together in my family home in Deir Ezzor, joined by my parents and the whole family, to walk in “our” street—a mini-village made only of the houses of my uncles and aunts. But months before Assad’s fall, I had a realization. I had not been able to picture any path that would lead me back. There was no way to pass through Damascus, and cousins who visited my hometown told me there was nothing left. The faces were different, with the people I knew either dead (from old age or killed in the war), and younger ones born after I left. The place, too, looked unrecognizable.
I was finally able to return to Syria in January 2025. As a journalist and researcher who tracked the Assad regime’s atrocities for 14 years, I was still shocked by how grim the reality in Syria was, including in regime-held areas spared the worst.
Read More: How the Syria Prisons Museum Is Uncovering Assad’s Crimes
My youngest brother, who like me studied in Damascus, but lived in the capital throughout the war, had less knowledge of the city’s roads than I did—and he lived there longer. For years he could not deviate from his usual route (which still involved zigzagging to avoid dead bodies on the roads) because of the immense risks of random arrests. The eastern regions we hail from were hotbeds of rebel opposition.
Because of the repressive nature of the regime, those of us living abroad knew much less about the suffering in regime-held areas—the people left to live under a President who has argued the war had purified the country. Even the relative safety in these areas was suffocating for those who kept their head down.
The regime’s collapse was so unexpected that Syrians, and many outsiders, still tend to attribute it to hidden forces (worldly or divine). Those who opposed the regime see it as a sheer miracle, others see it as an international conspiracy to replace Assad with jihadists willing to make peace with Israel. As silly as it may sound to analysts, this widespread sense of a miracle can help us understand the attachment many Syrians have to the current moment.
Only Syrians felt the psychological toll of 14 years of bloodshed and exile. The support for the new Sharaa government, and often angry or excessive reactions on social media to any form of dissent or criticism, is not a longing for authoritarian rule. It is emotional zeal or a form of anxiety about losing what once seemed impossible.
Read More: How Syria Can Forge a Lasting Peace
Analytically, I can now explain how something I had long stopped expecting happened so suddenly. The regime was hollow and brittle long before it crumbled; the Russian intervention in 2015 that helped it survive was weakened because of the war in Ukraine, and the real forces that kept it in power on the ground, namely Hezbollah and Iran, were paralyzed by Israel’s relentless campaign against every Hezbollah and Iran move in Syria. Crucially, there was a disciplined and powerful rebel force led by Sharaa in Idlib province ready to seize the moment.
Yet those who say they foresaw the regime’s imminent collapse were either lying or shooting in the dark. Assad had been welcomed back by his Arab neighbors and was on the way to full normalization and embrace in Europe and the U.S. The Biden Administration reportedly considered lifting biting sanctions as part of confidence-building measures—and wishful thinking—that involved Damascus pledging to curb Iranian activities in the country.
But despite this newfound analytical clarity, we are still trying to catch up to a reality that overturned not only a regime but the resignation we had built our lives around. We are still living in the moment of that glorious morning a year ago. Leave us be. Many of us had already mourned the homes we left behind, the streets that no longer looked like the ones in our memories. Overnight, that mourning was interrupted.
Syria still faces a number of significant challenges, from building an inclusive and non-sectarian political order after half a century of repressive rule, to restoring the rule of law and rebuilding a shattered economy. These are tall orders.
But the regime’s collapse has opened a new path for Syrians to reimagine and rebuild their country. And that is not just it. At least for now, Syrians are still savoring this moment—the moment when a regime that once seemed assured is no more.
For those inside Syria, the future looks brighter. And for those outside, like me, the door back is no longer sealed shut.
The post A Year After Assad’s Fall, I Still Remember That Glorious Morning appeared first on TIME.
