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A Firsthand Account of the Liberation of Damascus

Bashar al-Assad might have wanted his fall to precipitate chaos, but in Syria’s capital, order prevails and life is improving

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A Firsthand Account of the Liberation of Damascus
The entrance to an arms delivery center for soldiers who served in the Syrian army under the Assad regime to surrender their weapons. (Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Never, not in my wildest dreams, did I imagine that I would live to see an end to Baath Party rule in Syria and, more importantly, the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Yet there I was, in the early hours of Dec. 8, 2024, hearing the muezzin calling Muslims to morning prayer, followed by: “Allahu akbar [God is great], people of Damascus. Bashar the dog has run away.” The muezzin’s call pierced through the skies of Damascus and its empty streets, occasionally interrupted by celebratory gunfire. 

Every single Syrian was awake that night and glued to their television sets, not only in Damascus but in all four corners of the globe. Assad was indeed finished. He fled the city in the pitch of darkness, turning his back on Syria and all those who had died in almost 14 years of war. Even the Alawite community, on whose support he counted, were celebrating, accusing him of treason, corruption and sending their children to die in battle on his behalf. It was these same Alawites who had thrown down their arms and refused to shoot, seeing the miserable fate of those who had obeyed his orders back in 2011. Assad left them penniless, homeless and with no future. It was a remarkable moment in the history of Syria and, by extension, of the entire Arab world, ending 61 years of Baath Party rule and 54 years of the Assad family’s regime. 

Assad got on a plane and flew to Moscow, taking none of his cronies with him, not even his younger brother Maher, who, in pro-regime circles, had often been called the “Night President.” They used to say that Bashar worked by day and Maher took control of the city by night. Where was the “Night President,” whose mere name was enough to send shivers down the spine of any person living in Syria? Where were the thugs of his 4th Division, who held people by the throat, milking the population on a daily basis for whatever little money they still had left in their pockets? They had all thrown down their weapons, taken off their military fatigues, put on civilian clothes and fled to the Alawite villages on the Syrian coast. 

We would later find out that Assad was so cheap and cowardly that he even left behind the teenage children of his elder sister Bushra, who were visiting him at his home in the upscale neighborhood of al-Malki in central Damascus, reportedly to lift his spirits. Their father Assef Shawkat, a former security chief and acting defense minister, had been killed in an explosion back in 2012. Assad blamed it on the rebels. Many believed that he had been killed by Assad himself because it was feared that Shawkat was planning to stage a coup. 

Nobody knows exactly where Maher is today. Some are saying that he was wounded and fled to Iraq in a helicopter. Others claim he is now in Russia. We also don’t know where the rest of Assad’s extended family have fled, notably his cousin Rami Makhlouf, once the richest man in Syria, and his octogenarian uncle Rifaat, architect of the 1982 massacre in Hama. The latter returned to Syria just two years ago, after having spent three decades in exile for trying to topple his brother — Bashar’s father, Hafez — back in 1984. Reportedly, Rifaat and the Makhloufs are all either in Moscow or in their native village of al-Qardaha on the Syrian coast, which has since been overrun by the rebels. Rami’s brother Ehab was killed on the day that the regime fell, at the Syrian-Lebanese border, where he was trying to flee. He wasn’t shot by the rebels but rather by thieves trying to steal his brand-new BMW. 

Those who fled Syria at the start of the revolt back in 2011-2012 were escaping Assad’s jails and torture chambers. Those who chose to stay had to put up with both repression and terrible living conditions imposed by the regime. We also had to bear Assad’s madness and pictures, plastered on every wall and street corner. Every single business owner had suffered the invasion of their establishment by thugs from the so-called “Secret Bureau” of the Customs Department, slapping them with imaginary taxes that ran to hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars. 

To evade arrest, people had to pay bribes that went to the coffers of the Syrian presidency, and then close down their establishments to avoid another raid and lay off their employees. Any Syrian caught with dollars, even just a $100 bill, was jailed for anywhere between 60 days and seven years. Syria’s old-money elites had all but left the country and replacing them were Assad’s warlords, who did not establish a single project that was of use to the people but rather amassed wealth at their expense. They did not set up a single school, residential compound, university or orphanage, only monopolizing oil money and buying five-star hotels and prime real estate throughout Damascus. The slightest expression of dissent was enough to land people in jail, regardless of age, gender or social status. 

While we were getting six hours of electricity per day, Assad’s palaces were lit and so were the homes of his cronies, forcing us to pay plenty of money to go solar, purchase fuel for our generators at grossly inflated prices or simply live in darkness. He did not care — not a single bit — and did not even try to solve Syria’s chronic electricity problem. By the time of his fall, Assad was telling us: “I don’t care if you have electricity, water or heating fuel. What matters to me is that I have all of the above.” As a result, the once-proud streets of Damascus were dark by night; dark, abandoned and unsafe after sunset. The last major blackout had been during the final months of World War I, when the Ottomans turned off electricity because it became too costly to maintain. But that was more than 100 years ago, and it lasted for less than a year, whereas Assad left us in darkness for 14 years and was willing to keep us in the dark for another 14, or more, had the rebels not forced him out of Syria on Dec. 8. 

I lived in a neighborhood called Qura al-Assad, which has now been renamed Qura al-Sham (Arabic for “Damascus”). It had been built in the 1990s and named after then-President Hafez al-Assad. On the day of Bashar’s fall, residents immediately created a WhatsApp group to vote on the name change, choosing between Qura al-Sham and Qura al-Salam (“Peace”). It was their first taste of democracy in post-Assad Syria. Qura al-Sham was a 15-minute drive from Damascus, off the main road to Lebanon, surrounded by poor villages whose inhabitants worked as janitors and helpers in the villas of the regime’s moneyed elite. They knew these villas well and that they were now abandoned, and came down in large numbers to take revenge. Infiltrating them were small groups of petty criminals who made use of the lawlessness. But by Sunday evening, the criminals had all been rounded up by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Idlib-based military group responsible for the liberation of Damascus and the rest of Syria. 

HTS set up checkpoints in Qura al-Sham, with the help of locals who knew the residents by name, banning outsiders from entering. By morning, they had taken down a gold statue of Hafez and torn down every poster of Bashar throughout the neighborhood. Bakeries and grocery stores opened first, followed by pharmacies. On Sunday, Dec. 15, all schools were reopened in Damascus, one week after the fall of Assad.

The reason for the early hours of chaos was that the regime purposely withdrew from Damascus hours before the arrival of HTS. They wanted Damascus to be looted and torched. They wanted a bloodbath and were yearning to see people slaughtering each other on the streets, which did not happen. Apart from the aforementioned cases of petty theft, Damascus and its environs remained relatively safe, especially when compared to what might have happened had Assad gotten his way. Ordinary Syrians remained untouched. There was no kidnapping and no busting of inhabited homes, which must have pained Assad tremendously. 

In the city of Aleppo in the Syrian north, which fell to HTS on Nov. 29, the situation was the same; the transition was extremely smooth and peaceful. Given the magnitude of the regime collapse, one would have expected far more chaos, similar to that of the Ottoman collapse back in 1918, when for one entire week the markets of Damascus were left to be robbed by petty criminals, before the arrival of the Arab rebel force headed by Emir Faisal. At any rate, such disorder as occurred was nothing in return for getting rid of the Assad regime. 

Two days later, I drove to my office in Souq Saruja, a 700-year-old neighborhood outside Damascus’ Old City. There were two checkpoints, manned only by HTS personnel, who were extremely polite. One of them spoke with an Aleppine accent and I offered to show him my ID. He just smiled and said: “No need. We are only looking for unlicensed arms.” They were well fed and well dressed and I couldn’t help drawing a comparison with the Baathist villagers who invaded Damascus on March 8, 1963. The latter had come with vengeance in their eyes, wanting to strip Damascus of all that it owned, demanding a massive wave of nationalization that took private factories, banks and homes. Some of the finest homes of Damascus were seized on that day, and then again by Hafez after he became president in 1971 and decided to live in a confiscated house in al-Muhajireen, owned by the Saudi-based Syrian medical doctor Rashad Pharaon. He also confiscated the mansion of the industrialist Anwar al-Dassouki in the Damascus countryside, making it his summer palace. 

Many homes in the vicinity of al-Muhajireen were seized by Assad’s guards in 1970 and liberated on the morning of Dec. 9, 2024, 54 years later. Their rightful owners, or their grandchildren, simply walked in, changed the locks and reclaimed what was rightfully theirs. Some even put up signs saying, “Restored by the Will of the People.” The summer palace of the 19th-century Algerian resistance leader Emir Abdelkader al-Jazairi in Dummar, seized more recently by Bashar, was reclaimed by al-Jazairi’s grandchildren on Dec. 9, 2024. 

In Souq Saruja, residents were out in the old alleys, collecting garbage and cleaning the streets while waiting for the Damascus municipality to reopen. I saw them busily erasing Assad’s image from the cobbled streets and tearing down his giant posters. I saw a medical doctor and lawyer sweeping the streets, one from Aleppo and the other from Douma in the Damascus countryside. Everywhere, people were eager to help restore normal life and everybody was smiling and happy, glad to see the end of the Assad regime. Sarouja had once been called “Little Istanbul” because it housed the upper crust of Damascus notability under the Ottomans, including the splendid mansion of Ahmad Izzat Pasha al-Abed, senior adviser to Sultan Abdulhamid II and father of Syria’s first republican president, Mohammad Ali al-Abed (1932-1936). It had been seized by the Baathists in 1967 and transformed into a government school, then abandoned due to the high cost of its maintenance, becoming a workshop for shoemakers. Assad left it that way for 14 long years, making “Little Istanbul” a ragtag neighborhood of the impoverished. 

HTS distributed SOS numbers to all the residents of Damascus, creating a group on Telegram, a social media app, to report violations. They collaborated with the imam of the local mosque in every quarter to make sure that stolen property was returned to its rightful owners. They wrote to us saying that 8,524 people had been arrested in 48 hours for firing into the air to facilitate theft or cover up for vandalism. Another 1,720 people had been arrested for spreading sectarian rhetoric, while 4,000 were jailed for pretending to be HTS. More than 50,000 light arms were confiscated from the private homes of regime officials. HTS warned the people of Damascus not to open their doors to strangers, even if they claimed to be HTS. They also stressed that nobody would be persecuted for their sect or the manner in which they were dressed, so as to assure women who were not veiled that they could come out of their homes without fear of intimidation. 

There were a handful of cases of women reporting that they had been asked to cover their hair, but HTS insisted that these were individual cases and that this would not be state policy. True to their word, one week down the road, restaurants have now reopened and women can be seen smoking a hookah or drinking coffee with male friends, unveiled. The bars of Bab Sharqi, the Christian neighborhood of Old Damascus, are now all open and alcohol is served freely, with no interference from HTS. 

The HTS commander Ahmed al-Sharaa is now staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, while his top lieutenants are staying at the Damas Rose (formerly Le Meridien). They are all acting with extreme civility, treating everybody with utmost respect, especially Syrian Christians. Their constant message is that they have an axe to grind with perhaps 50 people, not more: the Assads, senior security officials, prison directors and any former militia member or officer with blood on their hands. Apart from that, everybody is safe and can return to their normal lives. 

All government workers are now back at their offices. Banks have reopened throughout Damascus. Former ministers were invited for a handover meeting with Syria’s new prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, who addressed them cordially. Everybody was present apart from the former ministers of defense and interior, who are both in hiding. Bashir sat next to the new Syrian flag and an HTS flag, which raised the ire of many who said that this was no different from what the Baathists had done with their flag, when they put it on equal footing with that of Syria. At his next meeting, Bashir had removed the HTS flag and appeared with the Syrian flag only. 

Every ambassador abroad remains at their post and some embassies have already raised the new flag, although it is yet to be decreed or adopted constitutionally. On Dec. 12, even some staffers at the Presidential Palace were called back to work. HTS traffic police are on the streets but, at police stations throughout the city, former police officers are back on duty, given that they know the city better than HTS. Even then, while the traffic police are small in number, traffic is orderly by the will of the people: organized and law-abiding, partly because it was the regime thugs who used to cross at traffic lights or drive down streets the wrong way, brandishing their weapons in the faces of both people and policemen. Getting rid of all that is injecting society with confidence and assurance, topped by the gradual return of electricity to all parts of the Syrian capital, with HTS promising that, within a month, that problem will become history. Electricity means far less theft and crime, which was high under the former regime. 

Adding to everybody’s relief was a statement by the Baath Party on Dec. 12, formally dissolving itself and restoring all its real estate, arms and vehicles to the new Syrian government. This Baath Party command had just been inaugurated by Assad in mid-2024, not knowing that they would be the last in the history of the Syrian Baath. They didn’t need to wait for de-Baathification to take place. They de-Baathified themselves, knowing that their chances of survival in post-Assad Syria were zero. Nobody in Syria is shedding a tear, glad to see the end of a fascist party that held them by the throat for 61 years, producing nothing but thugs like Saddam Hussein and Hafez and Bashar al-Assad.

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