A Year After Bashar Assad Fled, Syria struggles to Heal

On Monday, thousands of Syrians took to the streets to celebrate the anniversary of Assad’s fall. 
  
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, 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. 
 
The rebels took Damascus on Dec. 8 while Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow.   
Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Defense, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly rebel-controlled areas in 2019 and 2020. 
 
Read more here.