A year after Bashar Assad fled, Syria struggles to heal
A year ago, Mohammed Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, as he emerged from Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus, as rebel forces advancing on the capital opened its gates to release the prisoners.
The father of three, who was arrested in 2018 for evading compulsory military service, had gone through four other lockdowns before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex that has become synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now-deposed President Bashar al-Assad.
He remembered guards waiting to greet new prisoners with beatings and electric shocks.
“They said, ‘You have no rights here and we won’t call an ambulance unless we have a body,'” Marwan said.
It was a joyful return to a home full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province.
But in the year since, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year prison sentence.
He was experiencing chest pain and difficulty breathing, which turned out to be the result of tuberculosis.
Crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping beset him.
He is currently being treated for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs that focuses on rehabilitating former prisoners. Marwan said his physical and mental condition is gradually improving.
“We were in a near-death situation,” he said in Saydnaya.
“We are back to life now.”
Thousands of Syrians took to the streets on Monday to mark the anniversary of Assad’s overthrow.
Like Marwan, the country is struggling to recover a year after the end of the Assad dynasty’s 50-year oppressive reign following a 14-year civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced and the country battered and divided.
Assad’s ouster came as a shock even to the rebels who displaced him.
In late November 2024, groups in the country’s northwest led by the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose then-leader Ahmed al-Shara is currently the country’s interim president, launched an offensive in an attempt to retake the city of Aleppo from Assad’s forces.
To their surprise, the Syrian army collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo and then in important cities such as Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open.
Meanwhile, rebel groups in the south of the country took action to advance towards the capital.
While the rebels took Damascus on December 8, Assad was removed by Russian forces and remained in exile in Moscow.
But Russia, a long-time ally of Assad, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country’s new rulers and maintained bases on the Syrian coast.
Since his sudden rise to power, Al Shara has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, establishing ties with Western and Arab countries that have shunned Assad and once considered Al Shara a terrorist.
In November, he became the first Syrian president to visit Washington, D.C. since the country’s independence in 1946.
But diplomatic successes were offset by sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities were killed by pro-government Sunni fighters.
At least 590 people, including 167 children, have been killed by landmines in Syria since the fall of Assad, the Mine Advisory Group said on Monday, putting the country on track to record the world’s highest mine casualty rate in 2025.
Meanwhile, the economy remained stagnant despite the lifting of most Western sanctions.
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