The dictator, the rebels – and the father of three who stumbled barefoot into freedom

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Homs, Syria: A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as rebel forces pushing towards 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 Sednaya, 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 al-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.

Mohammad Marwan has spent the past year trying to recover from his time in prison under the Assad regime.

His December 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 centre in Homs that focuses 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 Sednaya, he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”

A country struggling to heal

This week, thousands of Syrians took to the streets to celebrate the anniversary of Assad’s fall.

People in Damascus celebrate a year since the downfall of the Assad regime.

Like Marwan, the country is 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 (HTS), 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.

People celebrate at Umayyad Square in Damascus on December 8, 2024.

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 mobilised to make their own push towards the capital.

The rebels took Damascus on December 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, a spokesperson for the Syrian Ministry of Defence, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organisational overhaul after Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly rebel-controlled areas in 2019 and 2020.

The rebel offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to pre-empt an expected major offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib intending to “finish the Idlib file”, Abdul Ghani said.

Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas”, he said.

A Syrian opposition fighter takes a picture of a comrade stepping on a portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo on November 30, 2024.

In timing the attack, the insurgents also took advantage of the facts that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and 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 defences collapsed, the rebels pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity”, Abdul Ghani said.

Successes abroad, challenges at home

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.

In November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.

US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Syria’s President Ahmad al-Sharaa at the White House in November.

In a speech in Damascus on Monday, al-Sharaa described his vision of Syria as “a strong country that belongs to its ancient past, looks forward to a promising future and is restoring its natural position in its Arab, regional and international environment” and will join “the ranks of the most advanced nations”.

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 United Nations-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.

Druze from Syria and Israel protest on the Israeli-Syrian border amid clashes between Syrian government forces and Druze armed groups in Sweida in July.

Remnants of the civil war are everywhere. The Mines Advisory Group reported on Monday that at least 590 people have been killed by landmines in Syria since Assad’s fall, including 167 children, putting the country on track to record the world’s highest landmine casualty rate in 2025.

Meanwhile, the economy has remained sluggish, despite the lifting of most Western sanctions. While Gulf countries have promised to invest in reconstruction projects, little has materialised on the ground. The World Bank estimates that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged areas will cost $US216 billion ($324 billion).

Rebuilding largely an individual effort

The rebuilding that has taken place has largely been 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 come back.

The most 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 larger reconstruction initiative appears still to be far off.

The remains of the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in January.

“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, although the area doesn’t even have a water connection.

His neighbour, 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.”

Boys play football amid destroyed buildings at the Yarmouk camp last December.

But he remains anxious about the precarious security situation and its economic impacts.

“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.”

The UN refugee agency reports that more than 1 million refugees and nearly 2 million internally displaced Syrians have returned to their homes since Assad’s fall. But without jobs and reconstruction, some will leave again.

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

Sometimes he picks up labour that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $US5.

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

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