HOMS, Syria — When Mohammad Marwan emerged, barefoot and disoriented, from Saydnaya prison a year ago, it was into a country in the middle of a dramatic upheaval. Rebel forces had pushed to the gates of Damascus and opened the notorious detention complex where Marwan had spent six years. Arrested in 2018 for avoiding compulsory military service, he had been moved through multiple detention centers before arriving at Saydnaya, a vast facility long associated with some of the worst abuses of the Assad era. He remembers new inmates being met with beatings and electric shocks, and guards telling them, “You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body.”
He reunited with family in his Homs province village on Dec. 8, 2024, amid celebrations. The year since, however, has been a slow, painful recovery. Marwan developed chest pain and breathing problems that were later diagnosed as tuberculosis. He also suffers crippling anxiety and insomnia. He is now on TB medication and attending counseling at a Homs center for former prisoners, which he credits with gradual improvement. “We were in something like a state of death,” he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”
Across Syria, thousands joined public commemorations marking a year since Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but the country remains deeply scarred by 14 years of civil war that killed an estimated half-million people, displaced millions and fractured the nation. The rapid collapse of government control surprised many. In late November 2024, forces in the northwest led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its then-leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa — now interim president — launched an offensive toward Aleppo to head off an anticipated government assault on Idlib. The Syrian army offered little resistance as units collapsed in Aleppo, then Hama and Homs, opening a route to Damascus. Rebels entered Damascus on Dec. 8 as Assad was flown to Moscow by Russian forces; Russia did not mount a defense and has since engaged with the new authorities while maintaining bases on Syria’s coast.
The new leadership has moved quickly to normalize relations abroad. Al-Sharaa has pursued diplomatic outreach, restoring ties with Western and Arab states that had largely isolated Assad’s government; in November he became the first Syrian president to visit Washington since 1946. He speaks of a forward-looking Syria reclaiming its regional role. Yet those diplomatic openings coexist with outbreaks of sectarian violence and local power struggles. Pro-government Sunni fighters were implicated in the killings of hundreds from Alawite and Druze communities, and in the southern province of Sweida local Druze groups have established de facto civil and military authorities. Tensions with Kurdish-led forces in the northeast persist despite a March agreement intended to integrate forces.
Regional actors remain cautious. Israel has taken control of a former U.N. buffer zone in southern Syria and continues occasional airstrikes and incursions; negotiations on a broader security arrangement have stalled. The legacy of war is still deadly: the Mines Advisory Group reported at least 590 landmine fatalities since Assad’s fall, including 167 children, putting Syria on a course to have one of the world’s highest landmine casualty rates in 2025.
Economically, recovery has been slow. Most Western sanctions have been lifted, but Gulf pledges to fund reconstruction have not materialized at scale. The World Bank estimates the cost to rebuild damaged areas at around $216 billion. For now, most repairs have been carried out piecemeal by homeowners and small business owners. In the heavily damaged Yarmouk Palestinian camp, a handful of shops and families have returned, but the worst-hit neighborhoods remain empty and large-scale reconstruction efforts are largely absent.
Many Syrians express cautious expectations. “They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed,” said resident Etab al-Hawari. Dentist Bassam Dimashqi noted there is “freedom of some sort” now but warned that restoring security is essential to attract investment and rebuild livelihoods. The U.N. refugee agency reports more than 1 million refugees and nearly 2 million internally displaced people have returned since Assad’s fall, yet without jobs, housing and infrastructure many face the prospect of leaving again.
For Marwan, life after detention is an improvement compared with the prison years, but economic pressures remain acute. He sometimes earns only 50,000–60,000 Syrian pounds a day — roughly $5 — and plans to seek better-paid work in Lebanon once he completes his TB treatment. His experience reflects a broader reality in Syria: the political order has changed, and some freedoms have returned, but rebuilding the social, economic and security foundations of the country remains a vast, uncertain task.