Syria, After the Fall of Assad, Reawakens From Its Half-Century Nightmare

The long and brutal reign of the Assad regime finally ended in December with a stunning two-week revolt. A coalition of insurgent factions, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), swept across Syria, taking city after city, largely unopposed. As the capital, Damascus, was about to fall, the dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the nation he had held captive to terror for so long. He was granted refuge by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, his longtime protector.

Overnight, the Syrian people emerged from decades of darkness with a profound collective trauma. For more than half a century, they had been forbidden to speak, protest, or engage in any meaningful activity against the state—ever since 1971, when Bashar’s father, Hafez, came to power. Suddenly, everyone found themselves in a new world led by rebels who were ideologues but hardly civil servants or technocrats. HTS had no experience running a country, let alone one gutted by war and on the verge of economic meltdown.

And yet, on a recent trip through the country, I found Syrians, one after another, expressing a sense of hope. I found Syrians—despite an inventory of despair and their current wariness toward the new, untested authorities—finding their voices, able to speak about the years of silence and secrets.

In this fragile postwar place, peace is not yet a given. Most aspects of life feel uncertain. And not unlike those tenuous months in 2003—after Saddam Hussein was overthrown in neighboring Iraq—the cycles of vengeance have begun to flare. In early March, just two days after my visit, violence erupted. Loyalist members of the Alawite sect, who controlled the country under Assad, battled militias that may or may not have been tied to the new government. More than 800 civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, were killed in two days of slaughter in the coastal Alawite stronghold of Latakia. Other killings occurred as well, targeting Sunni Muslims. By spring, further attacks were anticipated and Americans were advised to leave the country.

I’ve seen too much of this kind of bloodshed in the many years I’ve chronicled the plight of the Syrian people. I reported on the country during the revolution and the war; published two books about Syria, largely on the human rights infractions under the Assads; and interviewed more than a hundred of its victims. Most of my field missions occurred in 2012 (as the country devolved into civil war and ISIS began to dig in there) on the regime-held side of the country. I was granted visas to work; then, after reporting on a massacre by government troops in Daraya, I was told by sources in the government not to return, “or we’ll find a nice cell for you in Sednaya,” the Assads’ infamous prison. After that, between 2012 and 2015, I crossed the border from Turkey to the stronghold of the Free Syrian Army, largely working in Aleppo until radical groups such as ISIS made it too dangerous to operate due to threats of kidnapping.

Then, in December, I was awakened early by a Syrian friend in tears who told me the news: Assad had been overthrown. As I wrote, at the time, in Vanity Fair: “In an extraordinary turn of events, reminiscent of the fall of the Ceauşescus in Romania in December 1989 and the Taliban in November 2001, history pivoted. In the words of Syria’s foreign minister: ‘A new page is being written in the history of Syria.’ ”

And so I went back for the first time in a decade.

In late winter, with snow still on the mountains, I crossed the border from Lebanon into Syria. The cheerful man at passport control smiled and said, “You have not been in Damascus since 2012. I understand why.” This was code, meaning that my name was on a list. He verified what I already knew: Had I crossed this same border in earlier days, I would have been imprisoned, or worse. Later, I asked the Alawite driver accompanying me—a man who had worked for the regime by listening in on people’s telephone calls—if he could find out which branch of the secret service had wanted me. “Better not to know,” he said.

The new Syria I encountered during my week there, while precarious, was a land whose citizens sensed promise and possibility—and the belief that a heavy weight had been lifted. Even so, burdens remained in place. No matter where I went, Syrians shared memories and nightmares and tears, freely revealing what had happened in those shrouded years, telling a stranger the harrowing details of what was never meant to be spoken aloud.

Daraya

In the Assad time, the harshest forms of punishment were doled out to those who were the most resistant. Those who did not bow or kneel—to Hafez al-Assad, and then to his son, Bashar—were punished in the most horrific ways. In the old days, when you drove the road from Lebanon to Syria—I imagine the same road Saint Paul took nearly 2,000 years ago—the first sights you saw were enormous posters of Bashar, with his odd, triangular face. It was an Orwellian reminder that Syria was condemned to one-man rule, that obedience was part of the social contract. Now those posters are gone, the roads clear. The era of the new Syria has begun.

I wanted to return to the places I had worked during those years of war and resistance, and one of those locales was Daraya, a once-pleasant suburb five miles southwest of Damascus that had endured Bashar’s lash harder than most. Daraya had been known for producing grapes—and, incongruously, outdoor plastic furniture, the kind Syrians use in their gardens in the humid summer months.

The city had a largely Sunni Muslim population of some 200,000. For years, they coexisted peacefully with the Christian minority. Wealthy Damascenes kept summer villas there, with swimming pools and lush vegetation. But the regime feared Daraya. The town was also known for its history of nonviolent values, stretching back to the 1990s, when an open-minded Koran teacher, Sheik Abdul-akram Sika, taught his followers the words that Abel, the first son of Adam, whispered to Cain, his brother: “Though you stretch your hand to kill me, I do not stretch my hand to kill you.”

In 1998 a teenage science student, Yahya Shurbaji, began to attend the sheik’s study groups. The sessions dealt with conservative Islam but were far from radical. Shurbaji, like most Syrians who were not granted the privileges afforded their Alawite counterparts, was fed up with the flagging economy, state corruption, and lack of opportunity. He was inspired by the sheik’s teachings that nonviolent action can affect social change. After Shurbaji and his peers formed the Daraya Youth Group, preaching quiet civil resistance, their clique came to the attention of the authorities, who banned them from the mosque. Instead, they held their meetings outside, sitting in the freezing cold. One of their most successful projects, a so-called secret library of some 15,000 books, was swiftly shut down by state police.

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Though imprisoned for two years in the early 2000s, Shurbaji, upon his release, continued to fight Assad’s repression. When the Arab Spring arrived in Syria in March 2011, he and his colleagues carried bottles of water and roses to government forces who’d been sent to put down the protesters. On the bottles, they attached handwritten notes: “We are your brothers. Don’t kill us. The nation is big enough for all of us.”

It was inevitable that the dreaded Air Force Security Branch of the secret police would come for him. That September, Shurbaji; his brother, Ma’an; and another activist, Giyath Matar, were sent into the bowels of Sednaya, a military prison and death camp also known as the Human Slaughterhouse. In its dark cells, men and women were tortured, raped, starved, and broken. Many never reemerged. Ma’an’s mutilated remains came home four days later. Shurbaji’s body was never found.

Other Daraya activists continued their work. The more they peacefully protested, the more Assad’s helicopters, tanks, and soldiers obliterated the town.

In August 2012, while working in Damascus, I heard a rumor of a massacre in Daraya. I set off and managed to slip in with a local family. We smelled death before we saw it: the terrible stench of corpses in the sun. Bodies were strewn throughout the town, their limbs in unnatural positions. Bodies piled up in cellars. There were bloodstains on the walls of buildings, where terrified residents told me they had seen soldiers line people up and execute them, their heads exploding. The bereaved wandered in shock, trying to locate missing relatives.

Upon glimpsing an open mass grave near a mosque, we were turned back by Assad’s soldiers. But I saw bodies lying out in the sun, and I smelled rotten flesh. For several hours, I took testimonies from survivors before we were ordered to leave. Within days, state troops arrived, cleaned up the horror, and denied anything had happened. In Syria’s killing fields, the first casualty is the truth.

Ultimately, it came out that the massacre had claimed some 700 residents. Many more had died from mass starvation: The government burned the wheat crops and barred food deliveries, forcing people to resort to making soup from leaves and grass. One friend wrote to me that his daily sustenance was a radish and some salt. The famished inhabitants, their will shattered, finally succumbed; the Free Army of Daraya brokered a deal so that the fighters and residents could flee to safety in rebel-held Idlib in the north or to Dar’aa in the south.

And then, last December, after Assad’s forces collapsed following the rebels’ offensive, people by the score began to limp back to their houses and markets and government buildings. Upon their return, they found a destroyed but free Daraya.

In late February—with the same family that had taken me into the heart of the massacre site nearly 13 years before—​I drove back to Daraya. Residents were returning from exile in Idlib. (In recent years, some 12 million Syrians had been internally displaced or sought refuge abroad.) Now there were no checkpoints to pass through, but the town was gutted: fields of rubble, concrete buildings that looked as though they’d melted, half-decimated apartments where people had taken up residence once again, airing carpets out the windows. As I walked through the hollowed-out shadow of the suburb, I understood that despite the devastation, Daraya, once a bastion of peaceful protest, still had a resonance. Amid the cratered scene, I felt the simple, human belief in peace and home and perhaps, for many of the people, a new life.

Today, the stories of the government’s purge are legion here. “No one stayed behind—it was a ghost town,” explained Mohamed Holani, the 32-year-old who is presently in charge of the “security administration” in Daraya. But that was quickly changing. As winter was winding down, dusty shops were active again. Storekeepers sold shriveled parsnips, apples, cabbages, bags of oranges. Everything was exorbitantly expensive. By the side of the road, people sold green plastic jugs of petrol from Lebanon that they had brought over the border to offer to the locals at double or triple the price.

Even so, in the midst of the destruction, flags flew on low-hanging electrical wires displaying the new Syrian “independence” design—a horizontal tricolor of green, white, and black with three five-pointed stars, resurrected from the pre-Ba’athist days when Syria was freed from France. A man with an old-fashioned loudspeaker shouted in a tinny voice that he was buying old refrigerators.

By the mosque, where the worst crimes had happened during the massacre, was a dusty field. This is where I had stood years ago, trying to discern the open graves. Holani and Hussam Latham, a young activist who accompanied us, showed me how the massacre victims were finally laid to rest in the field. When the government troops had come in August 2012, he said, “they took everyone out of the buildings, separated men from women, and depending on their mood, they would either kill them or let them go. They took entire families. One family lost 40 extended members.”

After the massacre, simple wooden headstones had been initially placed on their graves, the two men recounted, but when the townspeople fled in 2016, they removed the grave markers. “This is because we thought the shabiha [Assad’s militias] would disrespect the dead,” Holani explained. But before departing, the residents had “recorded the position of each body and had GPS locations.”

Holani confided that he lost his brother and other relatives. “Now that I am home,” he said with conviction, “I can finally visit my brother’s grave.”

All these years later, I wondered aloud, it seemed ironic that the regime had targeted Daraya—a city whose activists’ methods had been peaceful and nonconfrontational. “It was because we were seen as the resistance, but also because we were close to the military airport,” Latham insisted. “They feared our rebellion would spread there, then to Damascus”—a short distance away.

We walked back to the main security office, an empty building with one heated room, where we sat drinking coffee. I asked how it could be that so many people I came across spoke so openly, without any remnant of fear. In Iraq, I remembered, it had taken people years to shed their Saddam-era silence.

Holani was thoughtful. He said the activists were never actually silent under Assad; instead, they often took enormous risks, knowing they could be imprisoned, tortured, or killed. “You have to understand,” Holani said. “In Daraya, injustice was haram. We were taught to rise up and fight against injustice. Even in 2011, we had to speak.

“Now we have the first flower of freedom, but it’s just the beginning.”

Damascus

I spent some time in the capital pricing ordinary things—milk, meat, fruit, cigarettes—to try to understand how ordinary people survived and fed their families. Many in the international community had seen the sanctions against Syria as leverage to get the new government to do what it wants; Syria had been one of the most comprehensively sanctioned nations in the world. That may finally change. In May, at the urging of the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, President Donald Trump met with the country’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, a former jihadist who had led al-Qaida’s faction in Syria. Within days, the US as well as nations in the Arab League and the EU vowed to lift sanctions.

But as I walked the streets, it was all too evident that the economy was a complete wreck. It had contracted 85 percent during the war, which had sparked hyperinflation. Now only 10 percent of Syrians live above the poverty line.

Here and there in the city I saw people carrying stacks of currency in plastic bags to buy groceries or even go out for a simple coffee. The notes are worth virtually nothing. At ATMs people lined up for hours, toting books to read while they waited.

I found many people disgruntled, bordering on furious. “This note used to be worth about $10 when I was a student,” said Raji, a Syrian Lebanese friend who accompanied me on the trip. “Now it’s worth 10 cents.” People are skilled at counting vast piles of money quickly. “It’s how we live,” my friend Rauda shrugged as she fanned through a stack of bills to pay for a streetside sandwich.

One springlike morning, I visited the monastery of Saint Takla in the ancient village of Maaloula, a longtime Christian bulwark. I was startled at how impoverished people had become since my last visit. In Maaloula, Sister Maria—whom I hadn’t seen since 2012 and who had been kidnapped at one point by extremist groups—spoke without hesitation or restraint. Her concerns were less with the past, including her own personal trauma, than with the future. “Our biggest problem right now in Syria is money,” she stressed. “Without money, you can’t buy food. We are running out of everything.” Elsewhere, as in Ghouta province to the southwest, I had seen people begging in the streets as well as children scrounging for food.

And yet in Damascus, despite all the deprivations, on a Thursday night—the first night of the weekend—the popular steak restaurant at the Hotel Chams Palace was packed with young Damascenes wearing Veja designer sneakers and Supreme hoodies. These were not Western visitors, but local 20- and 30-somethings drinking Lebanese wine and eating Wagyu steak flamed with a blowtorch. Somewhere, somehow, someone is making money from misery.

In the most curious sign of all, I visited a friend’s beauty salon on a Thursday afternoon to see how women were preparing for the weekend. The salon was in an affluent section of Damascus, and young women flocked there not just for blowouts and manicures but for Botox. A doctor in designer jeans wielding a syringe went from chair to chair, injecting young Syrian girls in their foreheads and cheeks.

Regardless of the pricey meals and cosmetic toxins, I felt a slight undercurrent of menace that, in its way, was a throwback to the Assad days because of the skyrocketing costs of everyday staples, and because when the prisons were emptied, criminals had been released along with political prisoners. We were advised, for instance, not to drive at night on the highway from Hama to Damascus.

There were existential threats as well. During my visit, Israel, Syria’s nemesis to the south, launched its first major air strikes after a long lull, killing two soldiers. The Israeli Defense Forces crept further into Syrian territory, moving additional troops into the buffer zone between Syria and the Golan Heights and taking control of areas beyond that perimeter, including Mount Hermon.

My hotel was in the beautiful Old City of Damascus. It is believed to be civilization’s longest continually inhabited city, dating to at least 8000 BC, and you feel the weight of history when you walk through the ancient streets, through the Christian quarter near Bab Touma, through the quarter where they sell dusty rugs and copper coffee pots; and my favorite street, where you can buy glass oil lamps and used vinyl singles—45s—from the 1960s. Late one night from my room, I could hear distant bombing, which reminded me of the war days when I would rush to my balcony to see plumes of black smoke rising over the outskirts of town. The next morning at breakfast, the waiter served me pita, olives, hummus, and coffee and told me that Israeli forces had bombed a military installation not far from the center of the city. Their supposed target: leftover weapons stockpiles.

A Syrian friend angrily railed. Israel, he said, was trying to force a confrontation with the HTS administration, which did not have the capacity to resist—part of an attempt, he theorized, to destabilize the fledgling government. Certainly, the presence of Israel was ubiquitous. The entire time I was in Syria, I received creepy text messages in Hebrew and English welcoming me to “Israeli air space.” Some of my Lebanese colleagues—well-versed in Israeli tactics from the deadly 2024 cellular attacks on Hezbollah’s leadership—told me they got such alerts all the time, describing them as “psyops” intended to intimidate cell phone users.

On one of my first days in Syria, the government hosted a “national dialogue” conference in the newly named People’s Palace in Damascus (formerly a hulking edifice for old-guard officials and bureaucrats)—a first step toward creating a new constitution. It was yet another sign that the Assads had been consigned to history. More than 900 delegates had arrived from abroad and across the country to attend workshops centered on the most crucial issues: freedom of expression and human rights, the economy, transitional justice, civil society. Meanwhile, the authorities (Al-Shara, the interim president, addressed the assembled) were trying to work with the EU and the US to lift crippling sanctions, which had been levied against a regime that no longer existed.

A few days later, another gathering was held for various civil society organizations responsible for human rights and accountability. The top priority on the agenda was the estimated 150,000 people whose whereabouts remain unknown. In the Assad days, secret police would arrive in the morning and people would disappear. (I titled my first book on Syria The Morning They Came for Us because many survivors I spoke with referred to their lives as being cleaved in two: before the police came, and after.)

Just as critical will be the excavation of mass graves. In places like Hama, where in 1982 an untold number of people were killed by Hafez al-Assad’s forces, the makeshift pits were long ago covered over with concrete—the regime approving permits for hotels and other properties to be deliberately built atop the graves.

The detainees emerging from the cells and dungeons of Sednaya and Palmyra (where political prisoners were sent in the 1980s and 1990s) were also struggling, readjusting. So were their families, and friends of those who vanished without a trace. According to the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison, it is estimated that at least 30,000 people have been executed there since the beginning of the war in 2011.

Syrian civil society had been particularly defiant, even during the worst days of Assad, by systematically and courageously monitoring human rights abuses. And representatives from those organizations were on hand to participate in the human rights conclave.

The conference had been widely touted as an opportunity to begin drafting a plan for best practices moving forward. And at the last minute, without any advance warning or clear explanation, it was canceled, apparently by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, which had nothing to do with the event. Angry representatives roamed the Sheraton Hotel lobby—a former Assad government stronghold now frequented by the HTS—and fumed. “This is the kind of thing the old government did,” one delegate said.

In the end it seemed to have been a simple communications glitch. I was informed that the hotel, still under the shadow of the previous regime, panicked that there had been no proper government consent for the event to take place and shelved it. The cancellation left people angry and worried: Were the incoming authorities, like their predecessors, wary of outside bodies serious about tracking their human rights policies?

Homs

The next day, I drove to Homs with Raji, who had spent his childhood summers in Syria with his relatives. Much of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, had been reduced to ruin during the war. Half of Homs is now a wasteland. In 2019 the UN did a damage assessment: More than 13,000 buildings had been bombed. This has prevented many of the city’s 6 million refugees and displaced from coming back.

In many ways Homs served as a microcosm of Syria itself—a vibrant mix of Sunni, Shia, Alawite, and Christian who lived side by side for centuries. During the war I had a surreal experience. I’d received permission to report alongside the Syrian Arab Army, Assad’s men, who were besieging the Free Syrian Army inside Homs. Although I felt I was on the wrong side of the conflict (the current-day equivalent of embedding with the Russian military in its campaign against Ukraine), it was an opportunity to understand the mindset of the Alawites and those aligned with Assad.

For days, I crawled through “mouse holes” in devastated buildings with testosterone-fueled soldiers chanting: “With my blood! With my soul! For Bashar!” and “God! Syria! Bashar is enough!” These troops had a kind of missionary zeal and almost primal fervor. Fighting the rebels meant taking one building at a time while government snipers picked off anyone who walked the streets.

Even so, I witnessed small miracles upon my return to Homs. The displaced had begun to return. Those who had stayed and survived, many of them barely, were now reclaiming a city that was coming back to life. At lunchtime at La Maison Dorée Café, the tables were full of men and women smoking shisha and drinking fresh juices. I met Omar, 64 (whose name I have changed for his safety). Clean-shaven, sunburned, and wearing a white sweater against the chill, he calmly ate a plate of lamb, pita, and tahini while quietly recounting the 15 years of his life that were lost in one of Assad’s prisons.

Starting in the late 1970s, Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood posed a major religious and political threat to the Assad clan. In the brotherhood’s view, Assad was an “enemy of Allah,” and its adherents launched a series of protests, bombings, and armed revolts. In November 1980 Omar—then in his teens—started attending a Koran study group in the 10th grade, regarding it as more of a social activity than a radical religious endeavor. Even so, others in the mosque sessions felt stifled by the regime and viewed the reading groups as an ideological pathway. For his part, Omar told me, he hadn’t counted on the consequences of joining in. “All it took for them to arrest you was having contact with someone in the brotherhood,” he remembered.

In 1982 he was a first-year engineering student at the university when the police came for him in the middle of the night. He said goodbye to his parents and siblings, not knowing why he was being taken away. He was sentenced in one of the so-called “on the spot courts” in which a bored judge served as prosecutor and jurist. “It was a one-minute sentencing,” Omar said. He would spend almost the next decade and a half in prison. He told me he was beaten with whips and wooden clubs, tortured, and sexually abused. One method of torture was slamming someone between doors to break their bones. He never thought he would be released. “We were tortured every single day,” he insisted. “It was just part of our day. Instead of a life sentence, we got tortured.” The whip that he was beaten with, he told me, was made from airplane tires, thick and lacerating when it lashed his skin. Another form of torture was to place men inside tires so they could not move and beat them until they passed out.

“I only saw my mother five times in 15 years,” he said. “It was only good luck that I saw her.” His mother was a telephone operator who would handle people’s calls through a switchboard, connecting one user to another through a central network of cords and plugs. One day she happened to connect a call placed by the mother of the prison warden. Realizing who she was, Omar’s mother begged the woman to intervene and allow her to see her son. Taking pity on her, the warden’s mother arranged for a visit; other visits followed. Most detainees never saw family members the entire time of their incarceration. (Omar was ultimately released in March 1995 by agreeing to collaborate with the authorities once he was on the outside—though, he told me, he never was asked to do so.)

Beyond the torture and the heartbreak, the supreme sacrifice he made was the life that was stolen from him. Unable to resume his engineering studies, he reintegrated into life and became a salesman, peddling medicine door-to-door. It took him years, however, to go to an Alawite area or pass a checkpoint without his heart catching in his throat. “They took 15 years of my life and my dream to be an engineer,” he said. “Instead, I ended up a small worker.”

In the noisy café Omar spoke freely and vividly about his years in prison. And yet, he admitted, “I keep looking nervously for the police.” He still cannot fathom that Assad and his minions are gone—or that they won’t come back.

A while later Raji and I ventured to a leafy, more upscale part of Homs. I climbed the stairs to an elegant, sprawling apartment where I had sought shelter during a very tense period of the war. At the time, I had been given a bed. But one night, two of the family members became terrified that the shabiha would find a foreigner under their roof and punish the entire household. Not wanting to bring them harm, I arranged for a new place to stay, packed my things and, dangerously past curfew, ran down the street under cover of night, praying I wouldn’t be shot by a sniper.

The family’s fear ran deep. And their concerns were not unwarranted. The man who had asked me to leave was later found dead—his corpse identified in one of the tens of thousands of pictures of Assad’s torture and murder victims, photographed with gruesome and painstaking deliberation by a camera unit hired by the regime—not unlike the death camp images made by the Khmer Rouge.

But now I was in postwar Homs—in that old apartment. We had tea and sweet cakes in the freezing cold (there was no electricity) while Issam Safardi, my 90-year-old host, told me about the pain of having her son, Hasan, then a young student in Aleppo, imprisoned in 1982 during the Muslim Brotherhood raids.

“I asked if he was part of the brotherhood,” she recalled. “He said he was never a member. ‘Mom, I just pray,’ he told me.” But being at a lakeside summer camp on the border with Turkey—which supported the radicals—was enough evidence, and Hasan, like Omar, was incarcerated for 15 years. “As a mother,” she said, “you can’t imagine how difficult it was having your child taken. But I was lucky. I have a friend who had three sons taken, and two died in prison.” What Safardi remembered most from those years was sitting in a chair outside the Military Intelligence Branch in Homs virtually every day for 15 years, begging for news of Hasan. “Eventually, the head of the branch got tired of seeing me. He said, ‘I keep seeing that old lady in my dreams.’ ”

When Hasan eventually came home, Safardi said: “I could never ask him what happened. If someone asks him and he begins to talk, I leave the room.” Still, in some ways, Hasan partially recovered: He got married, had two children, and found work in a cosmetics shop, in which he takes great pride.

My final visit in Homs was with a cheerful 38-year-old shop owner, Mustafa (not his real name), a descendant of a former government official during the French mandate. He was kept in Sednaya for seven years for what he calls “a misconception.”

“I thought I had freedom of speech,” he said. “I saw young people in Singapore, in Qatar, and other places getting their freedom. So I did the same.” One day the police from the Far’Falestine Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence—the most notoriously brutal division—came for him. He was 20, also an engineering student. The judge asked him, “Do you want the regime to fall?” He replied: “No, but I want freedom.” Mustafa was given 20 years. “The entire process of sentencing me,” he recalled, “took two minutes.”

Mustafa was kept underground in the worst part of Sednaya—the so-called Red Division—for a year. The cell, he told me, was the size of a coffin. He was fed once a day. To eat, he had to put his hand through a hole in the door and the guard would first beat the hand with a wooden club, then pour out some food—a spoonful of yogurt, four olives, a small piece of bread—into it. The hand beating was designed to break bones, though today he has no signs of disfigurement. It was so painful, he said, that sometimes, despite being desperately hungry, he would insist, “I don’t want to eat today.” A burly man who had been a bodybuilder as a student, he had lost 88 pounds by the time he got out.

Mustafa would cry all the time: for his family, who he knew were suffering; because of the pain of his daily punishments; and out of sheer loneliness and extreme isolation. He said he never knew those who were in the neighboring cells. “I heard only screams.” One year there was a guard from Dar’aa who was somewhat kind: One day he gave him two slices of bread instead of one. “He made me swear I would never tell anyone or he’d end up in jail with me.” In hell, one extra slice—a year—amounted to generosity.

Today, Mustafa is remarkably cheerful for someone who lost more than a decade to the whims of a Syrian judge in a heinous penal system. “It’s like my life stopped,” he said. “Like I was put in a coffin and it was locked.” Then his eyes grew moist. “How did I stay sane? I knew I was innocent. My brain kept working. But my personality became that of a frightened person…. I had lost the best years of my life.”

The day he was released, in 2014, a general came to the facility and let all the prisoners free. “He pointed randomly—you, you, you, you are released.” Remembering that day, Mustafa let himself cry. “It was like being a baby placed on a mother’s breast. I was a newborn.” He and some fellow inmates were simply put on a bus and dropped in the center of Homs. Upon exiting the bus, he noticed he was in front of a café. Its name was painted on a sign above the door: Virgin.

Eleven years after his release, he still finds the cruelty of Assad’s prisons unbearable to think about. “Human beings were imprisoned for saying something against the president. And then you die for that?”

Last December 8—the day Assad was overthrown—Mustafa went to work in his cosmetics shop, full of imported beauty products, and noticed that across the street at a military installation, the soldiers had run away and left their weapons. It could not be possible, he thought, that the regime had fallen. Or could it?

Along with his wife, his mother, and two children, they made their way to Clock Square, in the center of Homs, where it seemed the entire city had gathered. People were crying, holding one another. And there they heard that the Assads were no more. “I cried again,” he said. “But these were different tears than Sednaya. These were tears of happiness.”

Tadamon

The Damascus neighborhoods that were pounded the hardest are attempting to rebuild. This manifests itself not just in the widespread reconstruction efforts, but in the attempts to find the dead.

Tadamon is a section in the north of town. The cityscape is completely wiped out, as though a nuclear bomb hit it. Buildings seem suspended in mid-collapse, caught in a freeze-frame from some apocalyptic movie.

In Tadamon I met a group of masked men—Al-Mulathameen—who said they had also come from Idlib. It was dusk, and an amber light descended on the vacant lots around us. The men said they were with HTS, the new government. They claimed to have been assigned to locate the many mass graves that held the bodies of residents killed in a notorious massacre in April 2013.

Behind a garbage dump, one of the HTS conscripts, who identified himself by his nom de guerre, Abu Jibreal, stood on a mound of earth. “There are bodies beneath me,” he remarked, describing how the cellars and water wells throughout the area were stuffed with bodies. “The guy from the shabiha who gave the command to kill here was basically a mass murderer.”

He explained that on the day of the killings, a pit was dug and then 41 people, who had been shot at point-blank range near the mosque, were tossed inside, along with burning tires. He told us that the perpetrators, from Branch 227 of Military Intelligence, had also filmed the murders. Indeed, Human Rights Watch confirmed his account: The regime had trained its forces on Tadamon, conducting arbitrary arrests, then starting a campaign of indiscriminate attacks, summary killings, and mass starvation. A month before my arrival, the incoming Syrian security forces had arrested three former officers on charges of having participated in the massacre.

I tracked down a local journalist and asked him to spell out why Tadamon in 2013, like Daraya in 2012, had been the object of such barbarity and vengeance. In his view, a prejudice and distrust toward Palestinians had played a role. The town was home to a large refugee population from the territories. The regime, fearful of an uprising there, had singled them out for punishment. (Before the civil war, approximately half a million Palestinians, mainly of refugee status, resided in Syria.) Abu Jibreal, who implied that he himself was Palestinian, went on: “The Alawites and Druze lived in the outer ring around us. Basically, they looked at us as inhuman.” By 2018 the local people made a deal with the regime, just as the Daraya survivors had. They would halt their resistance, agree to surrender their weapons, and retreat to Idlib. “They said they would give us amnesty,” Abu Jibreal told me. “Instead, many people were sent directly to Sednaya.”

There is talk of a formal investigation of the massacre site. In the meantime, according to Abu Jibreal and his companions, the HTS team is treating the area as a “corpse dumpster, a mass graveyard.”

“What happened here?” I asked him.

“They tried to erase us,” he said.

Ghouta

On a warm Saturday morning—the first day of the holy month of Ramadan—we drove to eastern Ghouta, a southwestern province, passing buildings that resembled carcasses of steel and concrete. To snuff out dissent, the Assads, like Saddam Hussein’s assault on Kurdish civilians in Iraq, had used their arsenal of chemical weapons against their own people. During the revolution, an estimated 300 chemical bombardments had rained down on Ghouta, according to the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute, which in 2019 released a study on the atrocities, which had gone on for at least six years. Our aim was to meet with some survivors of these attacks.

Choking to death from sarin or chlorine is one of the cruelest ways to die. In 2016 I assisted a young survivor of the attacks, Kassem Eid, as he was writing his own accounts in his book, My Country. Eid’s heart had stopped from the gas. He was revived. Then he went on to fight with the rebels, having never carried a gun before. But the memory of dying—and then being revived—haunted him for years.

Near the city of Douma, I met with three gas survivors: Mohamed Swadan as well as Yeye and Naser, who, out of caution, only provided their first names. From the moment I began interacting with Naser, I could sense his deep despair. He was unable to make eye contact, shook when he held his coffee cup, and sat inertly, struggling to find words. He said he had nightmares and trouble sleeping. In time, he would tell me he was suffering from severe depression.

According to a comprehensive report by the French government—based on photographs, testimonies, and video documentation—analysts concluded that a series of attacks in and around Ghouta were likely conducted by the Assad regime, and that several lethal attacks took place on one day—April 7, 2018—prompting US, UK, and French warplanes to respond against Syrian facilities. The report contends: “Chemical weapons…and especially chlorine…are used to punish civilian populations present in zones held by fighters opposed to the Syrian regime and to create a climate of terror and panic that encourages them to surrender.” That very afternoon, Naser recounted, he had been engulfed in the fog of the chemical bombs. By evening, he had lost his pregnant wife, his two children, and his mother.

Naser spoke in a low voice, putting his hand over his heart, recalling the smell, the chaos, the terror. People, he said, had been running in all directions to try to escape the fumes. “For 15 minutes, I didn’t know what was happening,” he remembered. “Then I lost my vision.” Rescue workers arrived and began trying to wash people’s eyes out, but there wasn’t enough water. He passed out. When he woke up, there was an oxygen mask on his face and he was told his family was dead.

Counting on his fingers, he estimated that 42 people died. According to the White Helmets, the legendary Syrian Civil Defense service, 40 to 70 people were killed and hundreds injured.

Yeye told me that he had lost his brother, wife, son, and two daughters that day. “My wife was nine months pregnant,” he said. “My brother’s four kids also died.” Pulling out his mobile phone, he showed me a seven-year-old video of the aftermath: an apartment with bodies piled on top of one another, foam coming from their mouths. Afterward, he said, the most twisted aspect of the whole thing, in his view, was that government forces forbid the town’s survivors to say it was a chemical attack. Assad’s men came and fed them a concocted narrative: that the rebels had burned tires, which poisoned the people.

As Naser talked, Swadan disappeared and returned with a tray of coffee, sugar, and chocolate—and, touchingly, brought me shoe polish to clean my dusty boots. He also polished his own boots until they shined. The men then took me to the shelter where most of the people had died, and we walked the haunted street where, Yeye told me, he had “walked over so many dead people” to try to find his way out of the fog. He said that in the wake of the attacks, male survivors struggled with fertility issues. “We’ll never know how deeply it affected us mentally.”

He said that after the attack, he smelled the stench for months.

Tomorrow

Along with my pursuits as a journalist, I have now spent three years as the CEO of a war crimes unit called the Reckoning Project. The group’s chief focus has been documenting systematic atrocities committed by Vladimir Putin’s military on the citizens of Ukraine and Crimea. Our aim is to bring the actual perpetrators to justice in international courts. Two of our key staffers are Syrian, hired because of their experience in monitoring torture, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in their own country. Raji, for instance, helped build the first Syrian war crimes tribunal in Koblenz, Germany. There are patterns to war crimes. As in Ukraine, Putin viciously attacked Syria, starting in 2015, largely by bombing Aleppo.

When examining Syria’s wartime criminality, my concerns are twofold. First: that those who suffered such barbarism will be able to seek justice through court proceedings against alleged Syrian war criminals. Second: that the authorities undertake a nationwide effort at reconciliation. Such initiatives in post-apartheid South Africa (with its commissions on truth and reconciliation) and post-genocide Rwanda (under the auspices of its gacaca courts) proved essential in allowing victims and perpetrators to face their past so that their countries could begin to heal.

The challenge is to balance accountability and justice while avoiding the spiral of revenge and violence that has erupted in places like Iraq. HTS has extended an amnesty to conscripted soldiers of the former regime, meaning the new authorities may only be targeting high-ranking officials. But this model presents problems—as in Bosnia, where victims still must live side by side with their torturers, delaying the process of healing.

Much needs to be done. Domestic laws need to be passed; new tribunals established. Judicial reform is currently taking place. Syrian civil society is working hard to document and gather evidence. Refugees are beginning to come home. Yet, accountability stretches far beyond putting Assad’s henchmen in prison. How does a new government undertake such a massive job? Especially in an upside-down era in which democracy is in retreat, dictatorships are on the rise, and autocrats seem to have each other’s back? In the homes and cafés of Syria, it doesn’t escape a single soul that tonight Bashar al-Assad is sleeping comfortably in the land of Vladimir Putin, a man whose attack on Ukraine and its leader was summarized this way by Trump to Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “You should never have started it.”

When I stood outside of Sednaya Prison, the Human Slaughterhouse, I thought of all the Syrians who had passed through the gates, their fear so tangible that they could barely move. Many of them were teenagers when they entered. If they survived at all, they were middle-aged when they left.

I thought of Mustafa, the relative of a former high-ranking Syrian official from the time of the French mandate, who had told me of his years in prison, in isolation, being starved and tormented for doing nothing more than saying he wanted freedom. I thought of all the Syrians I had met who were tortured by regime officials, who taunted them with the words: “You want your freedom? Here’s your freedom!” as they whipped or raped or flayed them.

The new Syrian government—and the world at large, distracted by tyrants undeterred—owes it to the prisoners of Sednaya and the Assads’ other human slaughterhouses to make sure there is a system of justice, an accounting. And most of all, a reckoning.

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