A game of soccer at al-Baneen Secondary School in Daraa, Syria, where the civil war was kindled. A bit of anti-Assad graffiti on a school wall incited a crackdown and then protests. Photo / David Guttenfelder, the New York Times
The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which ended 13 years of civil war, ushered in a precarious new era for a country deeply scarred by its past.
Syrians are free, but the war’s toll is unfathomable — more than half a million people killed or missing, millions more displaced and many communities in tatters.
The battles have stopped, but sporadic violence persists, hobbling the country’s efforts to move forward.
I began covering Syria early in my career as a Middle East correspondent, sneaking across the border in 2012 to meet some of the first rebels taking up arms against the government as the civil war picked up.
In the years that followed, I chronicled how the conflict spread across the country, devastating cities and bringing incalculable suffering to so many people.
After the Assad regime fell in December, I rushed to the capital, Damascus, and found a swirl of joy and trepidation about the future.
Two months later, I returned with photographer David Guttenfelder and other colleagues to travel the country from south to north to see how Syrians were living through this momentous change.
Over a few weeks and hundreds of kilometres, we drove on pockmarked highways and dirt roads, met masked gunmen and jubilant children and spoke with scores of Syrians as they worked to rebuild their lives.
We began our journey a short drive from Syria’s southern border with Jordan at al-Baneen Secondary School, an unremarkable building in a neighbourhood so damaged by war that most people have left. The school is scarred by gunfire and shrapnel, its desks, chairs and many of its walls long gone.
It is a building that changed the course of Middle Eastern history.
In 2011, graffiti appeared on its walls threatening Assad, an ophthalmologist by training. “Your turn has come, doctor,” it read.
By that time, the anti-government uprisings known as the Arab Spring had already overthrown autocrats elsewhere in the Middle East.
Syrian authorities detained some students, demonstrations erupted demanding their release and police violently suppressed them, fuelling more protests. In the crackdown, a 13-year-old boy named Hamza al-Khateeb was killed.
These events kindled the civil war.
On our trip, we found Hamza’s mother, Samira al-Khateeb, in the town of al-Jeezeh, with the help of neighbours who directed us to her home.
Sitting sombrely in her son’s room, she recalled him as a quiet student who ate too many cookies and used to kiss her cheeks before leaving for school.
“I still have his clothes and his stuff,” she said. “I miss seeing him sleeping in this room.”
When the uprising began, Hamza tagged along to a demonstration. The security forces attacked, chaos ensued and the boy disappeared, presumably detained by police.
A month later, his relatives found his corpse in a morgue, bearing signs of abuse in custody. His torso was swollen, discoloured and marred by cuts and burns. Bullet holes pierced his chest and shoulder. His penis was missing, apparently having been cut off.
Images of “the child martyr” spread and Hamza became a potent symbol of the regime’s cruelty. United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mourned him, hoping his death would push Syria to “end the brutality and begin a transition to real democracy.”
Things only got worse.
The war escalated, drawing in the Syrian military, rebels, jihadis, Russia, Turkey, Iran and the US.
When it ended, more than half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million had fled their homes, about six million of them to other countries.
When we visited Daraa, residents were coming to grips with the war’s toll.
Next to the gutted school, boys gathered to play soccer. A large photo of Hamza hung in his family’s sitting room, where his cousin Khalid al-Khateeb, 51, said the years of war had been painful, but worth it to end the regime.
“Now we can breathe,” he said. “Before, the air used to rattle in our lungs.”
As we drove north to Damascus, we saw new life emerging, a city brimming with energy and fresh possibilities.
Since it had been Assad’s base, its centre bore fewer scars than other parts of the country.
But it is an ancient city whose soul is battered, its people and neighbourhoods rived with contradictions.
Damascus hit like a storm of traffic and pollution. Cars jammed roundabouts. Smoke from tailpipes and generators clogged the air.
Its streets also coursed with revolutionary fervour. People gathered nightly to celebrate, and residents organised concerts, debates and other events that Assad’s security services would have shut down.
“There was no way that this could have happened before,” said Hoda Abu Nabout, an organiser of an event for a book about women’s experiences during the war.
Leila Hashemi, a novelist in attendance, compared practicing Syria’s newfound freedoms to exercising when out of shape.
“Your muscles are still tight from the lack of movement,” she said, flapping her elbows like wings.
Across Damascus, we felt two forces emerging: a people practising freedoms long denied by a brutal regime and a government exerting control to build a new state.
It remains uncertain whether those forces will coexist or clash, especially in a damaged society with vast sectarian divisions whose rules must be rewritten.
The challenges ahead are clear in the neighbourhoods beyond the city centre that combat reduced to vast expanses of shattered concrete.
These ominously quiet areas used to be home to millions of shopkeepers, teachers, mechanics, students, civil servants and others.
Now, those residents are scattered elsewhere in Syria or beyond its borders, unable to easily return because their homes are gone.
Some families survive in these ruins.
“We live like cave people,” said Fidaa al-Eissa, a mother of four in the neighbourhood of Qaboun.
The family’s damaged apartment building stood next to others that had been flattened. It received two hours of electricity per day, which al-Eissa used to charge her computer and phone, run the washing machine, make tea and heat bathwater.
She kept in touch with former neighbours, refugees in Jordan, Turkey, and Germany, and tried to persuade them to come home.
“I want there to be life here again,” she said.
The state, too, largely collapsed during the war, its ability to provide services hollowed out by violence, corruption and poverty.
Damascus is the focus of efforts by Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa to build an administration that can put the country back together and ensure water, electricity and security.
One morning, hundreds of newly trained officers in crisp blue uniforms lined up outside the Damascus Police College for graduation.
They had finished a 10-day course aimed at bolstering the force’s ranks with basic training on how to handle guns and criminals.
It also included religious lessons, reflecting the Islamist orientation of al-Sharaa’s government.
The ceremony was laced with Islamic language, and large banners atop the college had been repainted, one with a verse from the Quran, another with the Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.”
When we asked whether members of Syria’s other religious groups would join a force whose symbols were so Islamic, a lead trainer, Maawiya al-Khatib, did not understand why not.
“These are simple slogans,” he said. “It’s a normal thing.”
The Islamist background of al-Sharaa has left many Syrians worried about how he could change the country and their place in it.
We got a glimpse of these concerns at a new play in Damascus that a friend told us about.
At a local theatre with buckets in the hallway to catch dripping water, we watched The Life of Basel Anis, a dark comedy about a shipwreck survivor who loses a leg to a shark only to find himself preyed upon by the very people who are supposed to help.
The audience laughed throughout, sympathising with the wounded hero and how much of his life was beyond his control. Backstage, the cast members said they strove to keep the arts alive, but some were worried that the new government would impose constraints.
One actor, Sedra Jabakhanji, said she feared that authorities would segregate unmarried men and women or force women to cover their hair.
The original script, the cast said, had poked fun at al-Sharaa by quoting a line from one of his speeches. They cut it to avoid problems.
“There are still people who aren’t convinced that the regime fell,” said Anwar al-Qassar, the assistant director. “It takes time to get rid of that phobia.”
The war shredded Syria’s social fabric, pitting neighbour against neighbour.
The regime granted vast privileges to the favoured from Assad’s own sect, while oppressing other groups.
After a two-hour drive from Damascus to Homs on the eighth day of our trip, we found former enemies trying to live together.
Along a boulevard in Homs, hundreds of cold, nervous men stood in long lines outside a police station, hoping to find a place for themselves in the new Syria.
They had all served in Assad’s military or security services, so when he lost the war, they did too. They were purged from their jobs and surrendered their weapons. Now, they were waiting for hours to receive civilian ID cards.
Stripped of their former privileges and power, they hung their heads and said little as the lines inched forward. The masked rebels-turned-police who controlled the city walked among them, hands on their guns.
The scene reflects one of Syria’s knottiest challenges, as the state grapples with how to deal with those who fought for Assad, many of them Alawites, the same religious minority as the ousted president.
We spent time in Homs to see how people were adapting, because the city’s sectarian mix had made the fighting there particularly personal. Alawite districts loyal to the regime had battled their Sunni Muslim neighbours, who supported the rebels.
We found an unlikely pair of men working together: a muscled former rebel in camouflage and face mask and an Alawite neighbourhood leader with a scarf twisted around his head to ward off the cold.
The two men had been on opposite sides of the war and showed no affinity towards each other. But they both wanted their city to recover.
The former rebel gave his nom de guerre, Abu Hajar, and said the regime had exiled him and his comrades from Homs during the war. Now he was 32, back home and in charge.
The government should punish those who killed innocent people, he said, but all of the Alawites could not be blamed for the regime’s violence. “We were against Bashar the dictator, not against his sect,” he said.
His counterpart was Mustafa Aboud, a 58-year-old neighbourhood leader and barber whom other Alawites counted on to deal with the new authorities.
The Alawites had suffered, too, Aboud said, their communities besieged and shelled, their relatives kidnapped. About 2000 people from his neighbourhood alone had been killed in the war, including soldiers, civilians and his own mother, by a rebel car bomb.
The purge of the former regime’s forces had created a crisis in his Alawite neighbourhood of Al-Zahra. Families lost their incomes, and residents feared they would be kidnapped or killed if they left the area to look for work.
“If they take me away, I have no one to ask about me, to pay money to get me out,” said a former soldier who declined to give his name for fear of retribution. “I have nothing.”
Al-Sharaa has called for unity among Syria’s sects, but rights groups have reported regular killings of Alawites. In March, after deadly attacks on the new government’s security forces, armed men rampaged through Syria’s Alawite heartland, killing an estimated 1600 people.
Hundreds of men from Aboud’s neighbourhood had gathered that morning to get their new IDs together. They had been scared to leave their community, so Aboud had organised buses and security with Abu Hajar.
In interviews, the men said they had been in Assad’s army, but as guards, cooks or administrators. None admitted having fought.
“I distributed vegetables,” one said, adding that most soldiers never had a choice.
“Even if I had fired shells, the order was not in my hands,” he said.
Aboud acknowledged that his fellow Alawites feared for the future but said they had to accept Syria’s new reality.
“This situation was imposed on us, so I tell them that we have to live with it and not deceive ourselves,” he said. “It is not about settling scores. It is about the future and how to feed our families.”
Twelve days into our trip, we diverted from the main highway to see what life was like in a rural area. I expected the villages to have fared better in the war since they had fewer spoils to offer than big cities did. I was wrong.
Our route took us through a succession of towns and hamlets torn apart by shelling and airstrikes and picked apart by pillagers — or both.
Some residents endured in what remained. Men herded sheep near shops smashed to rubble. Women hung laundry near walls with giant holes. Night fell and entire communities went dark.
One of our drivers mentioned a nearby village where “they stole all the roofs”. So, the next morning, we drove to Telmanes, where we met Abdel-Rahman Hamadi, 38. He had returned home after the war to find that scavengers had hammered in his reinforced concrete roof and stolen the rebar to sell for scrap.
“The dogs climbed up on the roof to steal the metal!” he said.
He had no money for repairs, so he had covered one room with plastic for his family to sleep in. “There are 20 villages around here that are destroyed like this,” he said.
That is probably an undercount. Across Syria, destructive battles often led to industrial-scale pillaging of homes, businesses, power stations and other facilities.
The country needs vast rebuilding projects to recover, but it remains unclear who might pay for them. The United Nations says half of Syria’s infrastructure no longer works and reconstruction is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, many times the country’s annual economic output of US$29 billion ($48b).
The scale of the plundering in Telmanes, a stretch of cinder-block homes surrounded by farmland and orchards, was mind-boggling.
Residents said the army expelled them and took over the village in 2019. Then, on the military’s watch, work crews descended like locusts, stripping the community clean with hammers, saws and bolt cutters.
They hauled off furniture and appliances. They popped tiles off bathroom walls. They tore out electrical wires, sinks, faucets and pipes.
They pulled down power lines and yanked internet cables from the ground. They stole maintenance-hole covers — and the ladders inside the maintenance holes. When the obvious spoils were gone, they knocked in the roofs to steal the rebar.
Osama Ismael, head of the local council, said only a few hundred of the village’s 5100 houses and six of its 13 mosques still had roofs.
Less than one-tenth of the pre-war population of 28,000 had returned since the war ended, and he wasn’t sure when the rest would. “We want people to come back, but there is no water,” he said.
Nor was there a pharmacy, a clinic, a bakery, or reliable internet or phone service.
One of the village’s 14 schools had reopened, which had been enough to persuade the extended Aboud family to come home.
They stayed together in a house with three rooms, a veranda, a kitchen and a bathroom. All the roofs were gone, so they had covered two rooms with plastic and erected a tent in the yard, where Khadija al-Omar, 30, slept with her husband and three children.
“We have no choice but to live here,” she said.
Life was hard, said Aboud al-Aboud, a relative who teaches at the school.
The family trucked in water to fill a metal tank. They salvaged wood for fires and cooked on an electric stove powered by 12 solar panels lined up across the yard.
“Usually we would put them on the roof,” al-Aboud said with a shrug. “But since there is no roof …”
The war devastated businesses in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, once also its economic engine.
Its historic centre lies in ruins, where stray dogs outnumber merchants in old stone souks.
As in the rest of the country, the momentous task of rebuilding the economy is just beginning.
“Aleppo is the nerve centre of Syria,” said Khalid Tahhan, the owner of a metal-smelting workshop who said he barely turns a profit. “Aleppo is a disaster zone.”
Before the war, Aleppo boasted a wealth of historic mosques, churches and caravansaries, ringing a towering citadel that drew tourists from around the world. It was a commercial hub, humming with factories that provided jobs and produced textiles, food products and other goods.
I never made it to Aleppo before the war. I first visited in 2012 with rebels who had taken over outlying neighbourhoods. Instead of the sights, I saw choppers transporting soldiers and fighter jets dropping bombs.
The fighting chewed through the city over many years, a violent collision of rebels, the Isis (Islamic State) group, government forces and the Russian military.
By the time I returned to Aleppo with my colleagues this year, only remnants of its past remained. Tourists are rare, and a small fraction of the industrial zone still functions, mere leftovers of a once-vaunted economy.
Syria faces tremendous hurdles to get its economy running. Hobbled for years by sanctions that are just beginning to ease, the country has been isolated from global trade, causing economic atrophy.
Per capita gross domestic product is one-fourth of what it was before the war. At Syria’s current growth rate, it won’t recoup its losses until 2080, the United Nations says.
Some businesspeople are working to recover.
Inside the Bahhade Furniture factory in the industrial zone, dozens of craftspeople handcarved patterns into the backs of couches and stapled foam pads onto seats.
Factory co-owner Jack Bahhade said that before the war, the family business had employed 40 people and exported to the US, Britain, Russia, and elsewhere.
In 2012, the factory was taken over by rebels from the Nusra Front, the affiliate of al-Qaeda founded by Syria’s new president. While the family operated out of an alternate facility, their original factory was looted. They were trying to rebuild the business when Assad fell.
Production is about 30% of what it was before the war. Demand is low and financial transactions are limited because Syrian banks lack cash.
Asked about al-Sharaa, Bahhade laughed, noting that despite the president’s extremist past, he had been welcomed by foreign officials and heads of state.
“If these countries accept him, why shouldn’t we?” he said.
If conditions improved, Bahhade said, Aleppo’s businesspeople would bounce back.
“If there is security and stability here, everything will go back to the way it was,” he said.
At the end of our trip, we drove to a refugee camp along the Turkish border in the far north, on the opposite side of Syria from where we began.
The camp had spread over the years as it absorbed people with nowhere else to go. Now, suddenly, those people could leave.
In a dirt lane in front of a drab house, we found Khalid al-Hajj, a father-of-six, piling his meagre possessions onto the back of a truck.
After surviving on aid and odd jobs in the camp for 13 years, he didn’t have much: thin mattresses, fuzzy blankets, pots, pans, a rusty dish rack, a gas stove and some firewood.
But he felt good. The war was over, and he was going home.
“I was always convinced that I would return,” said al-Hajj, 53.
His family had fled their hometown, Kafr Zeita, 130 km to the south, in 2012. Like millions of others, they came to Syria’s rebel-controlled northwest, and they settled in the camp.
It was crowded and poor, a sprawl of concrete structures with few trees or paved roads. At first, the extended family of 11 slept in a tent. Over time, they scraped together the money to build three small rooms.
Missing village life, al-Hajj planted a rose bush and kept two songbirds in a cage.
A few years ago, he said, a surprising dash of beauty appeared — a green shoot next to the rose bush.
Al-Hajj snipped off a piece, and its smell gave it away as a peach tree. Pleased, he tended to it as the war, and his time in the camp, dragged on.
His eldest son was killed by a government shell. He had another son, then another daughter, and his adult children bore him three grandchildren. The peach tree grew taller than him.
After the regime fell, he decided to return to his village, to fix up and live in his damaged home.
As he cleaned out his house in the camp, the pile in the back of the truck grew: metal window frames, solar panels and a ceiling fan. He climbed on top to tie everything down.
When it was time to leave, he expressed no nostalgia for the place where he had lived for so many years.
“We will take all of our stuff and leave it behind,” he said.
But first, he stood before the peach tree. It was 2.5m and the first pink buds of spring had appeared on its branches. Perhaps this year, he said, it would produce fruit, although he would not be there to taste it.
“We hope that it grows so that whoever comes here can eat from it,” he said.
He caressed a branch with his fingers. “May God protect you,” he said.
Then he climbed into the truck and headed home.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ben Hubbard
Photographs by: David Guttenfelder
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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