On anniversary of the fall of Bashar Assad, Syrians and their country struggle to heal

HOMS, Syria (AP) – A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as rebel forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.

Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now ousted President Bashar Assad.

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

His Dec. 8, 2024 homecoming to a house full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province was joyful.

But in the year since then, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing that turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.

He’s now undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan said his physical and mental situations have gradually improved.

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

Marwan’s country is also struggling to heal a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign came to an end following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced, and the country battered and divided.

Assad’s downfall came as a shock, even to the insurgents who unseated him. In late November 2024, groups in the country’s northwest – 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, aiming to take it back from Assad’s forces.

They were startled when the Syrian army collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo, then the key cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open. Meanwhile, insurgent groups in the country’s south mobilized to make their own push toward the capital.

The rebels took Damascus on Dec. 8 while Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow. But Russia, a longtime Assad ally, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country’s new rulers and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.

Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Defense, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after suffering heavy losses in 2019 and 2020, when Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly rebel-controlled areas.

The rebel offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to preempt an expected offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib, Abdul Ghani said.

“The defunct regime was preparing a very large campaign against the liberated areas, and it wanted to finish the Idlib file,” he said. Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas.”

In timing the attack, the insurgents also aimed to take advantage of the fact that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and that the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, another Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a damaging war with Israel.

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

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

A crowning moment of his success in the international arena: in November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.

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

There are ongoing tensions between the new government in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the country’s northeast, despite an agreement inked in March that was supposed to lead to a merger of their forces.

Israel is wary of Syria’s new Islamist-led government even though al-Sharaa has said he wants no conflict with the country. Israel has seized a formerly U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.

Meanwhile, the country’s 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 the country’s war-damaged areas will cost $216 billion.

The rebuilding that has taken place so far has largely been on a small scale, with individual owners paying to fix their own damaged houses and businesses.

On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp today largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp was all but abandoned after 2018.

Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have been coming back.

The most heavily damaged areas remain largely deserted but on the main street leading into the camp, bit by bit, blasted-out walls have been replaced in the buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have come back to their apartments. But any sort of larger reconstruction initiative appears to still 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,” said Maher al-Homsi, who is fixing his damaged home to move back to it even though the area doesn’t even have a water connection.

His neighbor, Etab al-Hawari, was willing to cut the new authorities some slack.

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

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

But he remains anxious about the still-precarious security situation and its impact on the still-flagging economy.

“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 do projects.”

Marwan, the former prisoner, says the post-Assad situation in Syria is “far better” than before. But he has also been struggling economically.

From time to time, he picks up labor that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $5.

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

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Sewell reported from Beirut. Associated Press journalist Omar Albam in Damascus contributed to this report.