One year after the fall of al-Assad, a reporter returns to Damascus

Damascus, Syria – On the morning of December 5, 2025, a taxi drove me across the Lebanon-Syria border. This time was different from my first trip across, in the early hours of December 9, 2024, just a day after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria for Moscow.

On that day, Syrian Army military vehicles were abandoned on the side of the highway to Damascus. Also abandoned, scattered along the highway’s shoulders, were the uniforms of the men who had once driven them.

A year later, they’re all gone. So, too, are the defaced portraits of Bashar and his father Hafez, who ruled the country from 1971 until last year. And gone is a sign I’d photographed a year earlier that read “Assad’s Syria welcomes you”.

Source: Aljazeera