Mustafa was 16 when he was detained and beaten by the police for the first time. It was early 2011, and the first stirrings of the Arab spring had grown into anti-government demonstrations across the Middle East. In Syria, a sense of anxious anticipation hung in the air, and the government was responding with propaganda films and TV shows designed to fire up nationalist sentiment. A friend of Mustafa’s hired him to play an extra in one of these shows. The job didn’t pay much, but it was more fun than the long hours Mustafa spent working in a restaurant kitchen. Tall and handsome, with dark eyes and long eyelashes, Mustafa dreamed that maybe one day he could join the long list of Syrians who starred on Arab TV dramas.
The youngest of three brothers and a sister, Mustafa had grown up in a crowded working-class district in the eastern part of Damascus. His father was a stern and conservative cleric, who would beat his children for even minor infringements. At 14, Mustafa had run away and a relative in another neighbourhood had found him the restaurant job. On his first day at work, it took him four hours to peel a sack of potatoes. Within a week, he could do it in half an hour. He soon began working two shifts: mornings in the kitchen and nights making deliveries. He worked 20 hours a day. Looking back now, Mustafa thinks of this as the happiest time of his life.
On the day of the shoot, Mustafa arrived in a downtown Damascus square, and joined a crowd of other extras marching in front of a large Syrian flag, chanting their love for the homeland and the president. Afterwards, feeling elated, he lingered in the square, and pulled out his mobile phone to take a picture of the scene. He did not notice the police station on the other side of the square, in the background of his photo. Two policemen approached him, asked for his ID and phone, and then, without warning, began beating him. They dragged him inside the station, threw him to the ground and stamped on him with their military boots. Then they tossed him in a filthy, dark toilet, where he remained for hours before finally being released.
Sitting on the bus home, Mustafa looked up at himself in the driver’s mirror. He didn’t recognise the bruised and bloodied face staring back at him. The arbitrariness of the assault shocked him. His own shouts for mercy had disgusted him. He vowed he would never let anything like this happen to him again.
Over the previous few years, police violence had increased as social unrest grew. Since Bashar al-Assad had taken power in 2000, he had accelerated Syria’s economic liberalisation, opening up a vast divide between the wealthy and the poor. The neglected agricultural regions, already ravaged by years of drought, were the worst affected. Many unemployed workers moved to the big cities, where they often felt ostracised and depended on communal networks for support. Disillusioned by religious institutions that had long ago been co-opted by the regime, poorer people sought comfort and inspiration in more radical, socially conscious young clerics, many of whom were advocating social reform through a hardline Islamist programme.
In March 2011, a few weeks after Mustafa’s encounter with the police, these tensions came to a head, as tens of thousands of Syrians took to the streets, denouncing the Assad regime and demanding freedom, justice and dignity. Even as the security forces responded to peaceful protests with violent repression, thousands of civilians continued to take to the streets. But increasingly, small bands of fighters began to assert themselves as the true leaders of the uprising. These fighters soon formed into armed Islamist factions, adopting religious symbols and rhetoric, many embracing an ultraconservative ideology. These gangs spread across Syria’s impoverished rural villages and marginalised city suburbs. President Assad and his supporters labelled civilian demonstrators and armed rebels as terrorists, portraying the regime as the protector of a secular Syria from a radical Islamist takeover.
After his beating, Mustafa’s heart was gripped with terror every time he passed through a government checkpoint. He did not participate in the anti-government protests – juggling two jobs, he had hardly enough time to sleep – but he still feared his name might be flagged by the security services. He worried that his father’s status as a cleric, and the fact that his sister wore a burqa, marked the entire family as suspect in the eyes of the regime.
Within months, the uprising had erupted into all-out civil war. Armed rebel groups captured towns and villages across large swathes of Syria. By May 2012, even the suburbs of Damascus, and parts of Homs, a major commercial centre, had fallen into rebel hands. The regime detained and tortured thousands of Syrians, yet they could not break the rising tide of the rebellion.
In the working-class neighbourhood where Mustafa grew up and where his father still lived, pre-existing feuds were grafted on to the new political situation. Those with grievances against the government, or already wanted by the police, aligned themselves with the protesters, offering protection against regime crackdowns. Their rivals pledged loyalty to the regime, and served as informants and collaborators.
One night in 2013, members of a pro-regime clan raided Mustafa’s father’s home, searching for Mustafa’s brothers who, unlike him, had joined the uprising. They ransacked the house, stole everything they could carry, and humiliated and insulted Mustafa’s father. The commander of an auxiliary force attached to an army brigade offered his protection to the family, on the condition that Mustafa and his younger brother join his troops. (Their elder brother had been detained by the regime, but managed to escape and flee to Germany.) Mustafa and his brother refused.
A few nights later, Mustafa was visiting his father when he was stopped in the street and bundled into a car. That night, the commander had him brought into the local branch of the security service. His men hung him from the ceiling and beat him so severely that he lost consciousness. He woke up in a small cell packed with dozens of other detainees. Many stood, taking turns to lie down on the filthy floor. A small hole in the corner, with a tap above it, served as both a toilet and a drinking source. The air stank of sweat, blood and rotting flesh. Some of the men had been there for months, with festering wounds.
After nearly three weeks of torture and starvation, Mustafa was given the same choice: either join the regime forces or remain in prison. For the second time in his life, he vowed that, no matter what happened next, he would do whatever it took to avoid prison, torture or humiliation again. He agreed to join the regime forces.
Along with other young men from the neighbourhood, Mustafa was co-opted into the national defence committees – an auxiliary force attached to the fourth armoured brigade, commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother. Mustafa was stationed at a checkpoint. It was a tedious job. He spent half the week standing guard at his position, one of many fortified points along the defensive line that encircled the rebel-held strongholds of eastern Ghouta, an area east of Damascus with a population of 400,000. For the rest of the week, Mustafa lived in Damascus, working multiple odd jobs – at a motorcycle repair shop, painting houses, or as a day labourer.
In these years, the regime and its allies – Iranian, Iraqi and Hezbollah fighters – were relentlessly bombarding the rebel-controlled areas in Damascus, Homs and elsewhere. They employed the same siege tactics across different parts of the country, but in eastern Ghouta it was particularly brutal. The siege lasted for years, trapping hundreds of thousands of civilians under relentless bombardment, starvation and deprivation. Entire neighbourhoods were flattened, while food and medical supplies were reduced to a trickle, controlled by regime checkpoints and war profiteers.
Not long ago, in Jobar, one of the neighbourhoods that had been under siege, I met an older man, short and stocky with closely cropped white hair. “We ate everything. Once, we ate a wolf. I think it was a wolf,” he recalled with a toothless smile. He scrolled through the photos on his phone, showing me images of the dead, scores from his extended family. Some were young men in fatigues, rebel fighters, but most were civilians, children, entire families. He pointed at a hole in the ground, a dark shaft descending beneath the rubble-strewn street. “We built a city under the city,” he said. “We moved through tunnels, and lived underground.” In the house where we spoke, everything of value had been stripped away: electrical wires, sockets, doors and window frames and furniture. “We could have resisted for a hundred years,” he said. “But the hunger … the hunger was what finally broke us.”
Back then, Mustafa did not spend much time thinking about the suffering of the other side. Working at checkpoints, he must have noticed how civilians were barred from bringing in fuel, cigarettes, or medicine. He must have seen them desperately bribing soldiers just to smuggle in meagre amounts of rice or flour.
“At that time, I didn’t see the revolution as something good because the ones who ended up dominating it were the neighbourhood thugs,” said Mustafa. “They looted shops, broke into homes, and destroyed the city, all in the name of the revolution.” But he also had few illusions about his own side. “When the regime forces entered these areas, they did the same: looting, raping, killing and leaving behind nothing but destruction.”
Mustafa got married, moved back into his father’s house and tried to eke out a living by buying old motorcycles, fixing and reselling them. In his neighbourhood, the pro-regime collaborators had lost interest in him after he joined up; he was one of them now. Their main concern were those who stubbornly refused to take up arms for the regime. But as Mustafa discovered, serving in one branch of the armed forces did not shield you from the others.
The Assad regime maintained multiple layers of oppressive state apparatuses, with overlapping and competing intelligence branches – for the military, the air force, state security and so on – each controlling vast networks of informants. These agencies had no clear jurisdiction, often detaining individuals, torturing them, releasing them, only for them to be arrested by another branch, creating a Kafkaesque cycle of repression.
Mustafa’s third arrest came in October 2017 – this time at the hands of the military police, who disregarded the fact that he was serving with the national defence militia and found him guilty of failing to report for military service. He spent two months in a dank, overcrowded cell. Detainees were not beaten or tortured as severely as they had been in Mustafa’s previous experience, but the stench and the suffocating heats were unbearable.
Upon his release, Mustafa was assigned to a newly formed army brigade. His battalion commander was a young officer in his 20s, just a few years older than him. Unlike most officers, who treated soldiers like cockroaches, this one was different, he seemed kind, and he treated Mustafa and the other soldiers with respect; a rare anomaly in the hierarchy of violence and cruelty that defined the Syrian army. The officer even allowed them to pray and fast during Ramadan – something strictly forbidden in the Syrian army – which earned him the ire of senior officers. His name was Ashraf.
Like Mustafa, it had never been a dream of Ashraf’s to fight for the Assad regime. When he had enrolled in military academy in 2010, Ashraf had hoped for a comfortable office job, a stable salary, maybe even a government car. It didn’t turn out like that.
Ashraf had grown up in a poor Alawaite family in Hama province. His father often worked as a labourer, sometimes loading animal manure on to trucks. Other times, he joined his brothers in a small workshop producing concrete cinder blocks. When Ashraf finished high school, he was accepted into the history department at Damascus University. However, his family could not afford to support him through four years of study on the uncertain prospect that he might secure a government job after graduation. Instead, he joined the stream of Syrian labourers heading to Lebanon in search of work. He tried to find work on construction sites, but foremen considered him too young and slight. Unable to secure a job, he returned to Syria.
Like many men in the Alawite community, who make up about 12% of Syria’s population, Ashraf’s only viable option was military school. For centuries, the Alawites eked out a living in the harsh, mountainous terrain of western Syria. Their society was structured around clan hierarchies, with powerful local bosses ruling over communities on behalf of feudal lords. Military service provided a stable income and a rare path out of poverty. In the five decades of the Assad family’s rule, the Alawite community experienced a significant rise in status. While some served as a praetorian guard, the community as a whole became a reliable reservoir of young rural recruits for the military and security apparatus.
In the early days of the Arab spring, Ashraf didn’t quite know what to make of the uprisings. He would listen to the morning military radio broadcasts that framed the events as a foreign conspiracy orchestrated by western and Zionist forces. Then, on Facebook, he would watch videos of the demonstrations and find himself sympathising with the protesters. Yet when clashes escalated into full-scale street battles across Syria, Ashraf – like the vast majority of the Syrian military – sided with the regime against the protesters, not out of sectarian loyalty but out of fear of an Islamist jihadist takeover.
By the end of 2012, Ashraf found himself in the midst of a gruelling war. Aleppo had fallen to the rebels, and fighting had spread across the whole of Syria. Isis was taking large tracts of land in the east. Most of Syria was under rebel control, with the regime holding only parts of Damascus, Homs and Hama.
Foreign backers had established a presence from the early days of the war, with Hezbollah, Iran and Iraqi militias on the side of Bashar al-Assad, while Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the US, Britain and Turkey armed and supported rebel factions. But it was not until Russia got involved in September 2015 that the war reached a turning point. “The Russians intervened, bringing massive firepower,” Ashraf recalled. Then the heavy battles began, and the regime started gradually regaining control, forcing the rebels into retreat.
During these years of fighting, the government forces were highly fragmented. Some units operated like militias, following the commands of rogue officers who acted as warlords, using their checkpoints for extortion, smuggling drugs and looting villages. There were also auxiliary units made up of civilian volunteers, alongside a host of Iranian, Iraqi, Afghan and Lebanese fighters. The Russians tried to impose some order. As a young and capable officer, Ashraf was picked to serve under the Russian command, where he underwent training and helped equip newly formed units. He was constantly on the move, shifting to a new sector every couple of months. Once an area was cleared, they would establish a base, only to withdraw and redeploy elsewhere soon after.
In 2018, Ashraf was part of an offensive to secure a major highway. The operation progressed until they reached a point where the Turkish military had established an observation post. Then came an order from the Russians: no shooting beyond this line. It became clear that there was an international agreement dictating the demarcation of territories. “They told us: ‘This is it. The army has reached its designated point, and you can’t advance further.’ That was the agreement between the Turks, the Iranians and the Russians. It marked the division of Syria,” Ashraf said.
For two years, the frontlines remained stable and most of the fighting ceased. By 2020, the rebel-held territory had shrunk to a small enclave in north-western Idlib, one of Syria’s poorest provinces even before the war, where millions of people were crammed into refugee camps. After nearly a decade of war, few believed Assad would be toppled. “It was the lowest point for our morale,” a leading officer in the rebel faction told me of this period. Ashraf thought the war was over.
During this time, for soldiers and civilians in regime-controlled areas, the economic situation was getting worse by the day. Soldiers were not getting paid. Ashraf thought that this was worse than war; people could barely make enough money to feed their families.
After 15 days at their post, soldiers were given two days’ leave, but they didn’t make enough money to get home. “They couldn’t even feed their children on the government salary, even with the extra $20 bonus they were given,” Ashraf said. “The soldiers’ salary was not enough to pay for transport, let alone cigarettes.” Since the state no longer supported its armed forces, any remaining loyalty Ashraf felt towards it evaporated. “My nation is my home, if I can only secure my home, then life is good.”
Desperate for resources, the regime resorted to any means possible to extract money from the population. Those who could afford it could buy an early release from their military service for $12,000. Deserters could also pay fines and legalise their status. The most common practice for officers was tafyish, where officers pocketed the soldiers’ salaries, along with an additional monthly bribe of $150 to $200. In return, soldiers – who were badly treated, underpaid and underfed – were allowed to return to their home towns and work civilian jobs. The officers, who themselves were poorly paid, gathered as many bribe-paying soldiers under their command as their rank and influence allowed, effectively transforming a large sector of the Syrian army into a serf-like workforce. For these officers, their tafyish soldiers were a kind of commodity, to be jealously guarded or traded to higher-ranking officers when the opportunity arose.
Under this system, Mustafa managed to spend most of his military service at home in Damascus, juggling multiple jobs to scrape together a living. He and his wife had a son. Mustafa always paid his officers their bribes punctually and even provided extra favours – a house paint job here, a car repair there. Mustafa would pay Ashraf, who would pass the payment up the chain of command.
Mustafa was a survivor. Not everyone who had been detained by regime forces early in the war chose to join the militias, but he did – out of fear and self-preservation. He disdained the violence deployed by both the regime and the rebels. He sought compromises to navigate the realities of war; his only desire was to be left alone so he could scrape together enough money to get himself out of poverty, but each decision led him deeper into the chaos.
When he bribed officers to return to Damascus, he still lived under the constant risk of being stopped at checkpoints and questioned about why he was not at his military post. To avoid trouble, he paid money to obtain a permit to carry a gun – not because he wanted a gun, but because simply flashing the licence at a checkpoint ensured safe passage. Yet, in the end, that permit would return to haunt him.
As the years passed, Ashraf felt increasingly detached. He still wore his uniform but saw himself and others in the army more and more as expendable tools in a war dictated by outside powers. The fractures within the army were obvious. Officers like him were poor and exhausted. Some of his colleagues were moonlighting as fuel smugglers from neighbouring Lebanon. Others still clung to the war as a means of preserving their power.
In late November 2024, Mustafa received an unexpected phone call from Ashraf, his senior officer, telling him to return to his military unit immediately. The call had nothing to do with developments in the war. It was more urgent than that: another officer had accused their commander of taking bribes. Ashraf assured Mustafa that he only needed to stay at the base for a few days, just long enough for things to quiet down. Mustafa donned his ill-fitting military uniform and headed to the base, carrying with him a ceramic washbasin, a gift for his commanding officer whom he and others had bribed to let them stay home.
That same day, Israeli jets struck targets along Syria’s border with Lebanon as part of their war with Hezbollah; to the east, American forces hit Iranian positions in retaliation for an attack on US bases; to the north, Kurdish and pro-Turkish forces exchanged artillery fire; and in the Idlib countryside, not far from Mustafa’s base, the army continued shelling rebel-held villages.
All in all, it was just another day in Syria’s 14-year-old civil war. None of the participants, not even the rebels preparing their long-awaited military operation against the regime, suspected that within just a few weeks, the war would be over.
Early on the morning of 27 November 2024, two rebel columns launched coordinated attacks on Syrian army positions in the countryside west of Aleppo, overwhelming government forces with their speed and coordination. Drones struck key communication and command hubs, as well as artillery batteries.
Over the previous four years, the rebel forces had transformed themselves. Gone were the old ragtag rebel fighters in mismatched uniforms and tracksuits. In their place emerged a more professional force made up of soldiers in military uniforms and flak jackets, carrying modern weapons and communications equipment. Rebel units advanced rapidly, cutting off supply lines and forcing regime troops into retreat. By the next day, advanced rebel units had reached the outskirts of Aleppo. After 36 hours of fighting, Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, fell to the rebels, a conquest some of their leaders had envisaged would take months.
Isolated in their camp near Idlib, wary that some of the soldiers would denounce others to the regime’s security services and convinced they were under surveillance, Mustafa and his fellow soldiers struggled to understand what was happening. On 28 November, Mustafa approached his senior officer, Ashraf, who confirmed that Aleppo had fallen, but offered little else. “I’ll have more answers later tonight,” he assured him.
The following night, Ashraf, along with two other battalion commanders, were summoned to the general’s quarters. There, under a thick haze of cigarette smoke, the men drank whisky and discussed the unfolding crisis. The general admitted there were no clear orders from army command, no explanation of what was happening on the ground, only the usual rhetoric of defiance blaring from regime-controlled radio and television.
The next day, Ashraf rang a few fellow officers at brigade headquarters, and they all assured him that reinforcements were coming. But as the rebels continued their advance, Ashraf wondered whether these reinforcements even existed. He listened to the military reports and followed the rebels’ progress on the map in disbelief. Town after town was falling without resistance – Ma’ara, Saraqib, Khan Sheikhun. Only in one mountainous area did army units and villages resist, fearing they would be slaughtered. Elsewhere, from Aleppo to Hama, army units withdrew without firing a shot.
On 1 December, the general gave orders for Ashraf’s brigade to abandon its fortified positions and withdraw 20 miles to the south. Shortly after the brigade arrived at their new quarters, a former agricultural institute in the town of Sqilbiya, a fleet of black vans belonging to a loyalist battalion pulled up. Military intelligence officers stepped out and detained the general. A new brigade leader was swiftly appointed. Military intelligence officers passed out weapons to the villagers in the area – who were mostly Shia and Ismailis, wary of the advance of the rebels, many of whom had jihadi backgrounds – to form a cordon behind the soldiers, blocking any further withdrawal. In front of Mustafa and Ashraf were the rebels; behind them were armed villagers and state security. They were stuck in the middle.
As the rebel forces advanced, Mustafa, Ashraf and the other soldiers remained in their new barracks. Soldiers who had once laid siege to rebel enclaves were now themselves trapped with no access to food or medicine. They had not received rations for five days, not even bedding for the freezing winter nights. They had not been paid, leaving them without money to buy food or cigarettes. Not that it mattered. The armed villagers behind them, loyal to the regime, would not have allowed them to enter a nearby village to purchase supplies.
Isolated, with no access to news or the internet, they had little understanding of what was happening around them. They feared making calls, knowing that the regime still tightly controlled the phone networks. At night, Mustafa and a friend, a former schoolteacher, would whisper about the course of the war. The teacher told him that it was all over, that the regime was going to fall. But he also warned Mustafa against trying to defect on his own. If they were to escape, it had to be a coordinated mass defection.
They began speaking with other soldiers, who were equally determined to defect. They had heard from a fellow soldier in Aleppo that the rebels were not behaving as they had before – they weren’t killing or torturing enemy soldiers who had defected. Instead, they disarmed them and let them go. For years, soldiers and militia had chosen to fight to the end rather than surrender, fearing they would be executed. It was a fate they had seen in numerous gruesome videos filmed by rebel soldiers over the course of the war. But in Aleppo, everything seemed to have changed. When word spread that captured soldiers were not being harmed, they began defecting in droves.
The army that had fought for 14 years was collapsing in a matter of days. “Maybe there were orders not to fight,” Ashraf said. “But there was also exhaustion – 14 years of it. No one could bear it any more. Our economic situation was in ruins. I couldn’t even feed my own children, so why would I keep fighting?”
On 7 December, Ashraf and Mustafa’s unit mounted their tanks and personnel carriers, but instead of advancing on the enemy, they turned towards the villagers, who were still loyal to the regime. A tense standoff ensued. “We told them we would fight our way through if they didn’t move,” Mustafa recalled. “But they refused. We told them the rebels were already in Damascus.”
After hours of negotiations, the deserters with their tanks and armoured vehicles forced their way through the cordon. With tanks leading the way, they drove for nearly four hours south towards Damascus. At dawn, the soldiers began receiving phone calls: the rebels had broken into the prisons, and reached the television station. The unit, now about a couple of hundred of them, abandoned their armoured vehicles and tanks, shedding their uniforms, and continued on foot.
They walked for nearly five hours before coming across a group of rebels in mud-spattered SUVs and pickup trucks. The rebels ordered the soldiers to surrender their weapons and destroy their military ID cards. By midday, they reached a bridge near Masyaf, a city 140 miles north of Damascus. Mustafa and the others, dressed in their tracksuits, stood aside and watched as a massive column of rebel vehicles drove past – brand-new SUVs and pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns.
“They didn’t even stop for us,” Mustafa recalled. “They jeered and laughed. And I thought, these pickups would have stood no chance against the tanks we had just abandoned, if we had stayed and fought.” Like other units all over Syria, the 76th mechanised division had melted away.
Mustafa arrived in Damascus, his feet bruised and blistered, but elated that the nightmare was over. “I thought, I am free,” he recalled. “I didn’t care if Syria was free, all I thought was, I am free.”
A week later, Mustafa visited Sednaya, the most notorious prison in Syria. After the fall of the regime, crowds had surrounded the prison, breaking down walls, using jackhammers to dig through concrete floors in search of secret cells, where they believed thousands were still imprisoned. Many dispersed when they realised that, beyond the few thousand men who had emerged in the first hours, there was no one else left alive. On the day Mustafa arrived, some people were still milling around the prison yard or sifting through thousands of documents strewn across the floors or piled high in storage rooms, desperately searching for a clue about the fate of their loved ones – a name, a picture, anything. Mustafa’s purpose was different: he wanted to see for himself if all the stories he had been hearing for years were in fact true. In the dark kitchen halls on the ground floor, Mustafa stood in front of iron stoves brimming with the ash of burned documents.
One rebel fighter, named Omar, walked down a dark corridor lined with small cells. He and two of his men peered into each cell, screwing up their faces at the stench before moving to the next. Omar roared at anyone standing nearby, demanding to know where the hidden cells were. Standing in a cell littered with dirty blankets, he said: “Those soldiers of Assad were worse than the Mongols and Tartars in the brutality they imposed on the people – worshippers of monkeys and pigs.” Then he turned and walked out.
“Worshippers of monkeys and pigs,” Mustafa hissed under his breath. The term was a common insult used against Shia and Alawites. “They [the rebels] all lived in the north, [in rebel-held areas] free from Bashar, and now they come here and insult us. Do they have any idea what we went through?” he added.
I followed Omar to speak to him. He was there to find his brother, he said. When he was 10, his two elder brothers were detained and his family fled from Damascus to the rebel-controlled Idlib province. A few years later, the family received news that the elder brother had been executed. But rumours persisted about the other brother – someone had seen him, someone had spoken to a prisoner who swore he was alive. As he spoke, Omar’s eyes burned with anger, but with his round, chubby face, there was also something childlike about him. He had been fighting for a decade, but he was still only 24.
As Omar was about to leave, a woman approached one of his men and said she had found an entrance outside the prison walls, one she was certain led to a hidden underground passage. Omar went with the woman in a small taxi. She sat in the front, while he squeezed his hefty frame into the backseat. His two men followed behind in their SUV.
The two cars drove along the service road that skirted the massive concrete bulk of the prison. A deep, wide moat ran alongside the road, separating it from a vast stretch of land littered with boulders and shrubs. The moat was just a dry trench, but Omar feared it was lined with mines. When the cars came to a stop, the woman pointed toward a small patch of disturbed earth in the distance, at the edge of the moat. “That’s the entrance to the underground chambers,” she said.
Omar and the two men skidded down the earthen embankment to the bottom of the moat. Omar took the lead, instructing the men behind him to step exactly where he stepped. A small herd of goats stood above the moat, oblivious to the imagined mines, watching curiously. The barren hills stretched beyond, silent and indifferent.
The men found nothing. By the time they returned to their starting point, where the woman was standing, the sun was setting, casting long shadows across the dry earth. “Can’t you call the military command to send digging equipment?” the woman asked angrily. “I know the passage is here.”
She pointed at different patches of earth. At first, Omar and his men dutifully followed her instructions, prodding the ground with their bayonets. Any fear of landmines faded, replaced by exhaustion. As the woman frantically pointed at different spots, it became clear there was no secret entrance. She sat on the ground, weeping. “Three brothers I had. They took them one after the other. For 10 years, I have been looking for them,” she sobbed.
Omar squatted on the edge of the moat, opposite her, and covered his face with his hands. The fierce, angry warrior faded away, revealing the boy still searching for his brother. Silently, he cried.
The woman called for revenge, her voice trembling, but Omar tried to reassure her. “It will come,” he said. “All in good time. Every one of them, those Alawi pigs, will be slaughtered and hung for the crimes they committed,” he said, his mouth quivering with anger. “I promise you, we will wipe them all out.”
When the forces of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group that led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, swept into Damascus at the end of the war, they found a city that looked old and exhausted, worn out by years of violence and crippling sanctions, its Ottoman and Mamluk architecture blackened by the fumes of rattling old cars and buses. Its people, wrapped in shabby clothes, stood in long queues for bread, which stretched along the sidewalks. Inflation was skyrocketing and stalls openly sold smuggled Lebanese fuel, and exchanged dollars in the street – the mere mention of which would previously have landed people in jail.
Marjeh square, also known as Martyrs’ Square, in the centre of the city, became a symbol of the roughly 150,000 people who had gone missing since the start of the war. At the centre of the square stands the Telegraph Column, an ornate monument built in 1905 by an Italian architect to mark the completion of the telegraph line connecting Damascus to Mecca. One day in December, someone must have first hung a flyer there – a single sheet of A4 paper with a photograph, a name, and a phone number, taped to the base of the monument. Then others followed. Within weeks, the base had turned white, plastered with hundreds of these desperate notices. Men climbed, sticking the flyers higher and higher, long past the point where anyone could read the names or numbers. The mere act of hanging a picture was in a way an act of acknowledging their existence publicly after years of fear.
What didn’t happen in the weeks after the fall of Damascus was almost as significant as what did. Unlike Baghdad in 2003, most public buildings and state institutions were neither looted nor burned, and life resumed quickly. Traffic clogged the streets, edging slowly past abandoned trucks and armoured vehicles. Discarded military uniforms piled up like street trash. Jubilant crowds filled the yards of the iconic Umayyad mosque, where foreign jihadis brushed shoulders with young Syrians waving revolutionary flags and posing for selfies. Young men flocked back into the city, many setting foot in Damascus for the first time in years after staying away to avoid conscription. The hated military checkpoints had been dismantled – only a few traces remained, a burned-out shell, an abandoned military Jeep.
In the ministries, employees of the former government resumed work under a new administration. They huddled in their overcrowded offices around small heaters, uncertain about their future, while upstairs, their new bosses – most of whom had come down to Damascus from the religiously conservative and economically liberal local administration of rebel-controlled Idlib – began their work in dismantling the legacy of the former regime.
The new administrators were baffled by how backwards Damascus seemed. They complained about the sluggish internet, the suffocating bureaucracy and the meagre salaries. “He [Bashar] had committed countless crimes against us, but we were the opposition,” Mohammad Ghazal, the newly appointed deputy minister in the ministry of local affairs in Damascus, told me in his office. “But these people here? They are his people, they lived under his rule all these years, and this is how they were left? All they can think about now is how to make it through the day.”
“I see that 14 years of my life have been wasted,” Ashraf told me, when I met him in his village a few weeks after the fall of the regime. “If I had studied history, I would have been a teacher by now, still receiving my salary. But now, all of that is gone.”
At home in his village, the poverty that had driven Ashraf to join the army was everywhere around him – in his small living room with its bare concrete floor, in his father’s old, tattered coat, in the rough tobacco they smoked. With the army and security forces disbanded and tens of thousands of government employees sent home – many of them Alawites – a growing sense of persecution was taking hold within Ashraf’s community.
He felt he had been betrayed twice over: once by the regime that he served and then, when it fell, by the rebels. By not fighting, he and other officers thought they would be rewarded by the new rulers in Damascus. Instead they were fired from their jobs, and they spent their days fearing reprisals. The rebels had managed – at least in major cities – to prevent widespread revenge attacks on former regime loyalists. Initially, Ashraf told me, HTS fighters entered his village and held a meeting with the elders, assuring them that all was well. But in much of the countryside, especially in areas where Sunni and Alawite villages coexisted, dozens of Alawite men had been kidnapped. Some had been summarily executed, others had disappeared. “My fears now,” Ashraf said, “are not of the regime any more, but of the gangs roaming the countryside and the people calling for vengeance.”
In December, when I spoke to a senior member of the HTS political bureau in Damascus, he told me that many involved in the revolution were enraged by the presence of people from the former regime still serving in state institutions. “We are fully convinced that many of these people remain loyal to the former regime,” he admitted. But he was also conscious that there were 4 million members of Assad’s Ba’ath party in Syria. “If they were to organise around a central figure, they could mobilise to form a counter-revolution. In other words, this is a very sensitive issue that we have to deal with calmly,” he said.
“Now, displaced Syrians are returning to their towns and villages, and some of them find themselves living next to individuals who had imprisoned or killed their relatives. Imagine how difficult it is to control such emotions,” he said. He feared that revenge killings against the Alawites could spiral out of control. The only solution was for alleged victims to pursue justice in the courts, he said. “Only this way, we can preserve peace.”
On 6 March, nearly three months after Damascus fell, a group of former regime officers attacked units from the newly formed Ministry of Defence and Interior in villages in the heart of the Alawite areas. Nearly 100 fighters from the new government were killed and 125 loyalist insurgents. What followed was a bloodbath. Government forces and battalions under their command attacked Alawite towns and villages, killing 1,225 civilians over one weekend, including women and children, execution style, often filming their brutal acts, forcing the men to crawl and howl like dogs before executing them. Bodies piled up in the streets as the fighters chanted sectarian slogans.
When I reached Ashraf on the phone, he spoke in a low voice, afraid of being overheard. He said he was staying with his brothers, and they had watched with terror as the convoys of armed soldiers from the new government drove past their house. In two neighbouring villages, civilians were killed, but Sunnis in Ashraf’s village had protected them so far.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said on the phone. He sounded fearful. “We can’t leave the area because anyone seen outside is being killed. We just sit here and wait, expecting them to attack the house at any minute.”
Late last year, Mustafa was arrested for the fourth time, this time by a couple of men from the neighbourhood who claimed they were working for HTS. Someone in the neighbourhood had informed them that Mustafa had a gun permit issued before the fall of the regime, and the two men demanded that he hand over the gun. Blindfolded, he was led to the same security service building where he had been first arrested more than a decade ago, now appropriated by the new regime. A few hours later, friends intervened and he was released.
“At least I wasn’t tortured this time,” Mustafa told me, scowling at the bowl of lentil soup in front of him. We were sitting in a restaurant in the centre of Damascus, an old establishment where the waiters wore suits and tried to intimidate clients with their haughty attitude. “I can cook much better lentils,” Mustafa said. “It doesn’t have enough lemon.”
He said that his dream was to save enough money so that one day he could open a restaurant, but his life had taken another tragic twist. His wife left him, took their child and all his money; she had called her brothers to help her strip the house, took everything and left. In this new reality, Mustafa felt very weak and exposed. His wife had a hold on him, he said, because she knew that he feared his past as a collaborator could come to light.
In the meantime, he said, he would join the security branch of HTS, which has been renamed the general security directorate of the new Syrian administration.
I asked him why.
“Because,” he replied, “you can’t survive on your own in this country.”
Some names have been changed
