|
Parts of the city of Homs have stood in ruins since 2012, when Assad’s military used artillery against besieged neighbourhoods. Photograph by Ammar Azzouz, 2025.

After Assad


Our first issue since the end of the Assad regime looks to the challenges of a new age.

6 MAY 2025
            





On the 8th of December, Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, and with that, more than half a century of rule by the Assad dictatorship came to an end. There were scenes of delirious joy as prison gates swung open and thousands of political prisoners emerged, but for the families of many more still missing, anxiety turned to horror and grief as the scale and detail of the regime’s systematic slaughter was confirmed.

Many Syrians and friends of Syrians received grim news in those days, while others were left haunted by uncertainty. Even as celebrations filled streets and squares inside and outside Syria, we couldn’t help but think of those who did not live to see this moment.

International responses to Assad’s fall were mixed. While some were positive, many were cautious, and others violently hostile.

The day after Assad fled, the UK Government’s first act was to pause asylum applications by Syrians, and at the time of writing that pause is still in effect, leaving thousands of people in limbo. The same day, Austria’s interior minister went further, instructing officials to prepare a deportation programme for Syrians.

And Israel’s response was to massively escalate military attacks in Syria.

Prior to the fall of Assad, Israeli bombing in Syria had been mostly limited to Iranian and Hezbollah targets. Assad’s military, directed as it was against Syria’s population rather than Israel, was let be. But Israel’s attacks on Iranian targets weakened Assad nonetheless, and they helped set conditions for the shock November offensive that took Syrian rebels from Idlib to Aleppo, then to Hama, Homs and Damascus, all in the space of ten days.

The moment the dictatorship was gone, Israel’s leaders experienced regret. The military assets which Assad had left behind were now seen as a potential threat to Israelis rather than Syrians, and in the space of just two days after his departure, the Israeli military carried out about 480 airstrikes.

It is feared that amongst those killed may have been the American journalist Austin Tice, missing since 2012, and reported to have been held in the headquarters of Assad’s General Intelligence Directorate in Kafr Sousa, Damascus, which was destroyed by an Israeli strike on December 8th. In this issue, as part of our interview with Syrian journalist Kholoud Helmi, we look at Israeli actions in southern Syria since the fall of Assad, particularly their invasion beyond the 1974 ceasefire lines, and their attempts to use Syria’s ethnic diversity as a means to weaken the new government.


Reconnecting Syria

A key test in assessing the international community’s response to Syria’s new situation is on sanctions policy. The UK, as well as the European Union and United States, imposed a wide range of sanctions in response to the Assad regime’s repression. However, the departure of Assad has not yet freed Syria from sanctions. This has been a surprise and a disappointment to many.

Broadly, there are three categories of sanctions imposed in response to human rights violations and crimes in Syria: one is of sanctions imposed by some governments which target individual perpetrators from the Assad regime, another is of UN sanctions to be enforced by all member states against designated terrorist groups, and a third is of sectoral sanctions, again imposed by some governments, which prohibit various forms of transactions with Syrian business sectors.

The measures in this third category, sectoral sanctions, were imposed to punish the Assad regime, and yet weeks and months after the regime’s collapse, governments have been achingly slow to lift them. In this issue, we talk to Eyad Hamid of the Syrian Legal Development Programme, and Vittorio Maresca di Serracapriola of Karam Shaar Advisory, particularly about UK sectoral sanctions on Syria.

Sanctions aren’t supposed to impact medical care, and yet they do. Eleanor Nott of the David Nott Foundation has travelled across Syria and seen their effects, and in this issue she explains why the health care sector needs urgent relief from sanctions.


The information war

Sorting truth from fiction has been at the heart of Syria’s struggle since the very beginnings of the 2011 civil uprising. Then, news media in Syria were under the tight control of the state, and faithfully reproduced the Assad regime’s message that the demonstrators filling the streets were actually armed terrorist gangs, and part of a foreign conspiracy.

As Syria’s revolution became an international war, the disinformation aspect also internationalised, most visibly in the Russian state’s propaganda, through its own media and via collaborators, attacking Syria’s White Helmets in particular, and portraying them as terrorists to undermine their evidence of Russian and Assad regime atrocities.

In response, this information war has seen the development of new tools for countering disinformation, most notably in the analysis of open source intelligence, used increasingly to test the truth of various claims, and to pinpoint responsibility for some of the most appalling acts, such as chemical attacks and targeted attacks on hospitals and aid workers.

Russia’s disinformation campaign helped to promote various conspiracy theorists and atrocity deniers in the US and in the UK, in order to influence political debate on Syria, and to cast doubt on evidence of the Assad regime’s and Russia’s crimes.

And Russia collaborated in the Assad regime’s coercion of witnesses. After the 7th April 2018 chemical attack in Douma, which killed forty-three people, the Russian government brought seventeen Syrians to the Hague to deny that a chemical attack had taken place. The Syrians were presented to the press at the headquarters of the OPCW, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. At the time, France’s envoy to the OPCW Philippe Lalliot described that event as an “obscene masquerade.”

These Russian efforts had an effect, and not only within toxic social media spaces. For example, in a Commons debate on 10 September 2018, then Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry suggested that the Government had been “relying on so-called open source intelligence provided by proscribed terrorist groups.”

MPs are hopefully more aware of the risks today. The Commons Foreign Affairs Committee—chaired by Emily Thornberry—is currently completing an inquiry into disinformation diplomacy.

The fall of the regime gave Syrians a new freedom to speak. For example, employees of the state news agency SANA were able to tell William Christou of The Guardian how the intelligence agencies used to watch their every move, monitoring their social media, planting spies amongst the staff, and detaining and interrogating journalists over the least suspicion.

More victims have felt able to tell of their experiences. Tawfiq Diam’s wife and four children were killed in the chemical attack of 7th April 2018. “If I’d spoken out before, Bashar al-Assad’s forces would have cut off my tongue,” Tawfiq told Yogita Limaye of the BBC.

And Syrian medics told the AFP news agency of how Assad’s government had coerced them into providing false testimony about the attack. “They knew where my family was in Damascus,” said orthopaedic surgeon Mohammed al-Hanash.

Unfortunately, Assad’s downfall has also brought with it a new wave of misinformation and disinformation. To learn more about why this is, and how Syrians are responding, in this issue we interview Ahmad Primo of Verify Syria, an organisation dedicated to fact checking Syria news stories.

We also speak to Yara Bader of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, hearing of the need for high quality journalism to tell the full story in a time of rumour and confusion, and for it to help connect Syria’s diverse communities.

And in our interview with Kholoud Helmi of the newspaper Enab Baladi, we learn more about the new media that came out of the revolution, and the challenges of working across the faultlines of a damaged nation.

Finally, Camilla Bruun Randrup of International Media Support, a Danish NGO, talks to us of the challenge of keeping Syrian independent media alive and healthy, not just for the sake of Syrians, but also for a world that needs a Syria at peace.




Cartoonist Ahmad Jalal and friends memorialise Khaled al-Eissa, Raed Fares, and Hammoud al-Juneid, in Kafranbel, Idlib, on November 30th.

Khaled, a journalist, was killed in 2016 by a bomb hidden in his home. Raed and Hammoud, founders of Radio Fresh, were killed by gunmen in 2018. A report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights held rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al Sham responsible for the shooting.

The town of Kafranbel had been occupied by regime forces from 2020 up until the HTS-led advance in November.

Read more about Raed Fares and Hammoud al-Juneid in our Spring 2019 issue.