For miles around, as far as the eye can see, the eastern suburbs of Damascus are a sea of undulating rubble and skeletal ruins. Part of this razed moonscape was once the bustling neighbourhood of Jobar, close to the city centre. For seven years it lay on the front line of a civil war.

I tripped over chunks of broken breezeblock and slipped down mounds of pulverised concrete scree as I followed Fadi Ghazi, a local estate agent – in so far as you can be one here – who was guiding me through tunnels he had dug for forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He scrabbled ahead, pointing out landmarks: the burnt-out tower block that had served as a sniper post, graffiti on a bullet-pocked wall that mocked opposition fighters as the “dogs of freedom”.

Ghazi joined the revolution after a mortar killed his brother in 2012. “When I pass by the place where he was killed,” he said, “I can still see his blood stain on the wall.” Now he looks lean and crabbed, with a nose like a raven’s beak and a red-prickled face with one cheekbone that jutted out farther than the other – the result, he said almost cheerfully, of being beaten in prison. He lifted up his shirt to show torture scars pitted across his back. One of his wrists had been stoved in by a bullet. “And I lost all my teeth,” he said, opening his mouth to show his bare gums. Many others had it worse: “There is no one around here not injured.” In between cigarettes, he coughed lugubriously, heaving up a lot of phlegm.

Ghazi came from the nearby neighbourhood of Zamalka, one of several villages that grew into a suburb known as Ghouta. The area was working-class, home to 2m people, most of them Sunni Muslims like the majority of Syria’s population. During the Arab spring, Ghouta was one of the first parts of Syria to rise up against the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad, who took over the country in 2000 following the 30-year rule of his father, Hafez.

We retraced the remains of a trench network. Ghazi crouched in rubble-filled hollows, shining his phone torch into dark crannies and collapsed sewer systems. “This tunnel leads to that building,” he said, pointing to a wrecked hulk with sandbagged sniper positions on the second floor. “We were always trying to tunnel towards their buildings and attack. They would be on the roof and we would come up from the basement.” He idly picked up an old flak jacket from under a hunk of bitumen and pointed out a crater made by an artillery shell that had nearly missed him. A little way off an old woman wearing workman’s gloves scavenged for scrap among the twisted panels of rusted corrugated iron that had been used as roofs for the trenches.

At the height of their success, around 2013, regional rebel forces controlled large swathes of the country. But less than a year later they were marginalised by Islamic State (IS), an extremist group which grew out of the insurgency in Iraq, successfully gained a foothold in Syria and grabbed a third of it for itself. The regime besieged rebel-held areas, starved civilians and bombed its own people with chemical weapons, but couldn’t stamp out the rebellion. In desperation, Assad sought help from Iran and Russia. Kaleidoscopic alliances and enmities evolved as Turkey, America and Gulf states backed, then retracted, support from different rebel groups.

By 2018, is had been defeated. Faced with overwhelming pressure from Iranian-funded militias and Russian airstrikes, opposition groups in Ghouta and other parts of Syria concluded negotiations to withdraw to the one rebel-held province left in the country – Idlib in the north. Over time Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), another Islamist group, gained dominance. Fighting continued sporadically, but most people thought the opposition was spent and Assad had essentially won.

That was until November 2024, when the opposition groups joined a coalition under the leadership of HTS. In a surprise attack, they advanced south out of Idlib, sweeping through city after city.

On the night of December 8th, as the opposition was closing in on the capital, Ghazi gathered a few friends. They confronted a regime checkpoint in Zamalka, manned by local militiamen they knew by sight, who surrendered their weapons immediately and disappeared. Now armed, Ghazi and his friends advanced to the city centre, going from checkpoint to checkpoint. They found many abandoned: “Sometimes the teapot was still warm.” On the highway bridge to Jobar they came across a group of soldiers who were in pyjamas, having discarded their uniforms. At checkpoints that were still manned, Ghazi’s posse ran out of the darkness shouting “Allahu Akbar”, spooking the soldiers into scurrying off. Ghazi scrolled his phone to show me a video of himself from that night – wild-eyed, dancing and shouting with glee, draped in ammunition belts and weighed down with four or five captured rifles.

His small band of 30 men were among the first members of the opposition to arrive in Damascus. They headed to a branch of the Mukhabarat, the hated security service. Finding it abandoned, they broke down cell doors to free prisoners and then moved on. More and more people joined them as they progressed through the city, setting police stations and Mukhabarat offices on fire.

News came through that the president had fled the capital. After 53 years of Assad rule, the regime had fallen. In the early hours of the morning, Ghazi encountered fighters from the Southern Front, a relatively moderate rebel force. “They had big beards and were driving very muddy SUVs. We greeted them and embraced.”

After Damascus fell, fighters from HTS and other opposition groups fanned out over the country, returning, in many cases, to garrison neighbourhoods they had left years before. They stood at crossroads and at the entrances to government buildings wearing a mix of camouflage and black technical gear, faces often covered with balaclavas and using the monikers they had adopted over years of war: Abu Arab, Abu Mohammed, Abu Ahmed (“Abu” is a commonly used honorific meaning “father of”). Inhabitants of Damascus approached them cautiously and found them friendly.

Even so the fact that liberation had come at the hands of Islamists who had once dispatched suicide-bombers was the source of some befuddlement. Youmn Abulhosn, a feminist activist I knew before the war, said, “It’s like you have been drunk and now you are waking up with a hangover. It took us some time to understand what had happened and now we are beginning to ask: where are we going?”

The men who had conquered the country were ideologically disparate. They had spent years fighting but the demands of peace are very different to those of war. They now faced an even bigger task than toppling Assad – working together without a common enemy to rebuild the country.

When I travelled to Syria in February the initial mood of jubilation had dissipated. Everyone understood the fragility of the situation. Syria’s economy was crippled and its infrastructure wrecked. The country was still under sanctions from the West. The revolution had not resolved tensions between ethnic and religious minorities. But I sensed forbearance, even patience. No one wanted a return to civil war.

In public Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new president of Syria who formerly led HTS,  pledged to prevent attacks on the Alawites, the religious sect to which Assad belonged and from which he drew his support. But it was clear when I was there that the number of violent incidents, whether out of revenge or from opportunistic criminality, were increasing and that Alawites were the main target. “We don’t know if it’s systematic,” a frightened Alawite doctor told me. “We hear about individual acts, but these individual acts are happening a lot.”

In January bands of armed men – possibly with links to HTS – killed Alawite villagers in the province of Homs, before the new government sent security forces to intervene. But there were conflicting accounts as to the circumstances and the death toll. In the coastal town of Baniyas crowds of Alawites protested after a video went viral showing one of their shrines on fire – it turned out that the footage had been shot years before. In Damascus I heard that Alawite families were being thrown out of their homes. But the cases I was able to investigate seemed to involve people who were living in accommodation that the old regime had reserved for families of the armed forces. I met Marianna, a young Alawite student, whose father, a retired colonel, lived in one of these houses. She said that the new authorities had given him six months to leave: “It’s normal. We knew this house belonged to the Ministry of Defence and we were there only temporarily.”

The rest of Marianna’s family were living in an apartment they owned in Baniyas. In February she told me things were calm there. “People are tired of war. They don’t want to start a new fight or create a sectarian conflict.” She thought much of the fear and outrage on social media were stoked by exaggerated rumours.

In early March, shortly after I left the country, HTS-affiliated groups tried to flush out remnants of the Assad regime from Alawite villages in the mountains along the coast. Intimidating checkpoints were established in Alawite areas. In response, pro-Assad forces launched co-ordinated attacks on government security personnel. Fierce fighting ensued and the HTS affiliates rampaged through Baniyas, raiding Alawite homes, looting and killing civilians. The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an NGO, recorded 179 dead in Baniyas alone, including nine children. Many families that survived were sheltered by their Sunni neighbours.

More than a thousand civilians were killed over several days of violent reprisals. It was as bad as any massacre during the civil war. It took the government several days to restore order. By then thousands of Alawite families, Marianna’s among them, had fled.

In Zamalka, HTS operated out of an abandoned school with a roof smashed by artillery into crenellations. I met Abu Hamza, the local HTS commander, at the flat of Abu Talal. The latter was a commander in the Syrian National Army (SNA), a Turkish-backed militia, who had returned to his neighbourhood.

Abu Talal was a little older than his HTS comrade, tubby, avuncular, softly spoken. We sat on foam pallets around a diesel heater, the kind found in every Syrian home. The air was thick with gasoline fug. Abu Talal’s wife and daughters poured glasses of tea and sat to listen. His eldest son, Talal, also a fighter, stacked his gun in the corner and brought trays of cheese and zaat’ar pies. Abu Hamza declined to eat – he was fasting that day out of religious devotion. Abu Talal held up a big cheesy pie and teased him, “I will keep eating in front of you until you get hungry!”

Abu Hamza joined Jabhat al-Nusra, the group that would evolve into HTS, in 2013. At the time it was allied to IS. It had not been an easy choice. “You were becoming part of al-Qaeda, so everyone was hunting you. Not just the regime, the Americans, everyone.” Jabhat al-Nusra was known to be selective and disciplined, but it was one of the smallest groups in Ghouta, with only about 1,000 fighters. “We were also the poorest,” said Abu Hamza. Once they captured a tank and sold it to another group for food.

Soon after he joined Jabhat al-Nusra, its leader, al-Jolani, as al-Sharaa was then known, broke with IS. “It was one of the most difficult phases we went through,” he said. “Brothers went in different directions.”

It wasn’t just is and Jabhat al-Nusra who were at odds – many rebel groups scrapped with each other. Relations between Abu Hamza’s and Abu Talal’s groups were at times fractious. They fought over control of the lucrative entry points to Turkey. “The arguments were always about money,” commented Abu Talal.

“It is interesting you are sitting here together,” I said. “It’s kawana,” they said in unison. (Kawana is the unofficial slogan of the HTS coalition. It means “U-turn”.)

Abu Hamza, the HTS commander, had turned his attention towards the future. When I asked him what was preoccupying him, he laughed and said he was thinking of getting married. He had deferred the decision throughout the war. “I was scared to stop the revolutionary path. For a Muslim with a family, life takes over part of your heart and so you become attached to life.” Now, he was turning his attention to the future. He smiled politely and excused himself.

Before the war Abu Talal ran a business manufacturing lift panels. As he rewound his memories, revisiting so many years and so much loss, he fell silent, pressing his hands against his face to stem the tears. He had spent three months in prison in 2011, crammed into a cell with 200 men, forced to sit blindfolded in silence, forbidden to pray, made to listen to the screams from the interrogation room. He had seen fundamentalist groups funded by donors in the Gulf take over Ghouta during the siege: cars exploded, bodies in the street with the word kaffir (“infidel”), hung around their necks.

“We had two enemies,” he said ruefully. “The regime and those individuals seeded among us.” Now he hoped to hang up his gun, open a business and spend time with his wife and three children.

“Maybe our destiny is with Sharaa,” he said. “But maybe he is only a tool to liberate the country. Now we see some good things happening, so we are following him. But if we feel that he’s not being honest, we will have no problem in going against him. We are done with dictators and all that suffering. If he goes off the path, we will have no hesitation to have a second or a third or a fourth revolution.”

Iwent to see Firas Bitar near his home in the mountains of Qalamoun, north of Damascus. Bitar was a renowned officer who had been among the first to defect from the regime early in the Arab spring. He had fought in Ghouta before being squeezed out by the Islamist groups. (Ghazi had dug tunnels for him during the siege and Abu Talal remembered his strategic acumen.)

I drove past the infamous Sednaya prison, a V-shaped block that squatted on a hill, where thousands of people had been tortured by the Assad regime. It had been renamed on Google Maps as “I will fuck every Alawite sister”. I reached a high snowy plateau of bare winter orchards, dotted with cubist farmhouses, all smashed and empty. Bitar had his headquarters in the wrecked shell of a relative’s house. Holes in the walls were plugged with cement. Thick felt blankets hung in front of boarded-up windows to guard against the raw draft. Bitar had a short salt-and-pepper beard and dark circles around his eyes. He was jolly, but looked older than his 46 years, tired and worn out. He coughed heavily.

In exile in Idlib, Bitar and his rebel group had been ignored by HTS and sidelined by the Turkish-backed groups. They had not been party to the planning of the recent campaign and joined in only when it was already under way. “During these 14 years, can you imagine how it was to remain independent in all that chaos?” he asked me wryly.

Bitar, who said he commanded 4,000 men, described how he had visited the Ministry of Defence to place his group under the new national authority. The day he arrived, the minister, formerly head of HTS’s armed wing, was in Saudi Arabia, so he met the head of the army, “I am not sure what his real name is,” he said. Bitar believes that there should no longer be independent armed groups if the country is to flourish. But, he said, “They didn’t ask for our weapons and we didn’t give them.”

As we spoke a deputy came into the room and asked him to authorise a voucher for fuel for one of the cars that the group was using to patrol the Lebanese border. When I asked him about funding, he laughed sardonically. “We are relying on our families.”

As well as unifying the militias, Sharaa has been attempting to convince Western countries to lift sanctions imposed during the Assad era. (To date Europe has lifted some of them; America has been more recalcitrant.) The economy is in ruins. War devastated it and corruption under Assad hollowed it out further. The regime had imposed exorbitant taxes on solar panels, mobile phones and cars. Petrol was rationed and large swathes of economic activity were controlled by members of the ruling clan. In 2020 the currency collapsed. Government salaries fell to pitifully small amounts. Around 90% of Syrians were living in poverty. Electricity in Damascus was only available for one hour in every eight or ten.

A greater range of goods appeared in the markets after the regime fell, but few can afford them. Damascus is grimy and down-at-heel: all broken windows and pocked façades, crumbling kerbs, piebald verges, scraggly palms, dry, cracked fountains. It reminded me of Baghdad in 2003. All the cars are old and dented. Women pick through piles of jumble on the pavements. Crowds surge at bakeries. Resellers offer up stacks of pita to passing motorists for a mark-up. At every intersection boys hawk five-litre plastic bottles of greenish gasoline. Because of ongoing sanctions, much of the internet, including the Apple app store, is inaccessible without a workaround. No international credit or debit cards work; everything has to be paid for in thick wads of cash. As there are not enough banknotes the Syrian pound has actually, on occasion, risen in value against the dollar.

Abu Hatem, a friend of Ghazi, the estate agent, was renting an apartment in a ruined block in Zamalka for around $8 a month. He was an older man with a dignified bearing; he warmed a battered tea pot on the gasoline stove as we talked. His home in Jobar was destroyed, and his family was now squeezed into two rooms: 17 people, including two of his sons, his daughter, who had recently returned from Turkey, and many grandchildren. Now the owner of the flat wanted to sell. “It costs at least 100,000 Syrian pounds [about $10] a day to feed everyone…That’s the problem!” he said. “There are no soldiers on corners threatening to detain you, so now people are not afraid of the regime, but they are talking about jobs and money.”

Local administrations have been set up across Syria since the old regime fell; Zamalka’s was housed in one of the few buildings in the area that was in a decent state of repair. In spite of this, the concrete interior radiated a clammy coldness that a Syrian friend of mine dubbed the “breath of death”. On the ground floor I saw a group of women volunteers registering the legal cases of people who had returned to find their apartments fraudulently sold in their absence.

The new governor of Zamalka, Thayr Adris, had been appointed only two days before I met him. An engineer by training, he acted as an intelligence liaison between different rebel groups during the siege of Ghouta, then ran the revolutionary council in the neighbourhood. He was known to be independent.

We sat in his office bundled up in our coats. On his desk was a rolled-up map, Sellotape, a hole punch, a stapler and a spiral-bound notebook. He rested his hand on a packet of cigarettes. “I was not comfortable to be appointed without an election,” he said. But he was heartened that the new authorities had chosen “flexible” people like himself to run local councils.

Councils in Damascus and elsewhere seemed to be dependent on the largesse of local notables for donations. One councilman in another area of Ghouta told me he had raised money to buy new water pumps: before only 30% of people in their area had running water; now 70% did. In Qalamoun, I had seen Bitar meet about 30 local businessmen and councillors to discuss how to obtain heating in schools and medicines for the chronically ill.

One of the volunteers working with the council in Zamalka told me they had managed to persuade doctors to volunteer at the tiny local health clinic so that it could open more than one or two days a week. For the moment, Adris said he had no budget or civil infrastructure except for a WhatsApp group which connected all the governors of the Ghouta area. “There is no government yet,” he admitted. “But somehow we are keeping Syria safe.”

The new government told soldiers from Assad’s army to register at regional offices in order to receive a certificate of discharge. But a few thousand were imprisoned despite assurances of an amnesty. (I talked to the family members of two captains who were being held, apparently incommunicado.) The police were disbanded, but some former regime officers were retained. A fivefold raise in government salaries was announced; at the same time hundreds of thousands of ministerial employees were placed on furlough or fired.

One day I went to a demonstration calling for their reinstatement. A crowd of between 150 and 200 people gathered at a square in downtown Damascus. Most of them were Alawites who had been dismissed from various ministries. They held up banners and gave interviews to TV news crews. A few HTS soldiers who were milling nearby did not seem to mind.

The crowd was indignant and aggrieved. People said they were accused of being “fake employees with two or three jobs” or “ghosts of the regime”. Some said that the new government was “seeking revenge”.

“We feel insecure,” said one woman who had been fired from the Ministry of Economics. “One of them told me at work, ‘If there was no law we would have slaughtered you all for being Alawite.’”

“It’s like the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood,” said a man dressed in navy blue. “They told people to come into work, and then they fired them all…when I went to the Ministry of Employment to complain, I discovered they had all been fired too.”

In Homs, Syria’s third city, I also found visible sectarian tension. HTS patrols guarded middle-class Alawite neighbourhoods, and carried out “pacification” raids in poorer Alawite areas, detaining men and confiscating weapons.

I met Amira Al Khudr, a young political activist of mixed Sunni-Alawite parentage. Full of energetic vim with wavy hair flying in all directions, she was sympathetic to the idea that the raids were “necessary” to tamp down the activities of former regime militiamen. Still, too many people were disappearing into prisons – much as they had done under the old regime.

Since the beginning of February there had been a spate of killings and kidnappings in the city. Al-Khudr had known two of the Alawite victims personally. One was the driver who used to take her to school; the other a young woman she had been at school with. Al-Khudr herself avoided the city centre. “No one dares to go out at night in Homs,” she told me. “Everyone is scared. No one is returning to normal life.”

She said she understood Sunni resentment and ire. “We lived somehow normally, while many thousands of Sunnis were killed, millions were made refugees and internally displaced, living in camps. Myself, my family and friends know they suffered, and we don’t want to provoke them by walking into their neighbourhoods or sitting in a café bareheaded. It’s not very safe, and we appreciate their pain.”

In Homs I stayed the night at the Catholic Archbishopric, set in a dense maze of smashed-up streets in the Old City. It had been rebuilt since the fighting, but its walls were still scarred with bullet holes. During the civil war Archbishop Jacques Mourad had been kidnapped by is for five months. Christians, who had once seen Assad as their protector against Islamists, left Syria in droves over the course of the civil war. The archbishop had just visited Aleppo, where only 20,000 Catholics from a pre-war community of 180,000 remained. In Homs, the archbishop told me, there had been instances of HTS soldiers segregating men and women on public transport and asking bareheaded women to veil themselves.

Archbishop Mourad wore his hope faithfully, but he was worried and seemed ineffably sad. He said he had initially found the new authorities reassuring. “I think there is a miracle in this moment, the way HTS and Sharaa and the new government have given hope by giving positive speeches.” But lawlessness was increasing: houses robbed, car jackings, the settling of old scores, kidnappings, thefts of agricultural equipment. Courts had all but ceased working. There were no police to make a complaint to, even in the case of a traffic accident. Everything was extrajudicial, contingent, unsystematised. When the archbishop had tried to find out what had happened to parishioners who had been arrested, he encountered a polite wall of unco-operativeness. The new governor took his calls, “but it’s my impression that he can’t do much.”

Despite this, he still believed that national unity was possible. “During all these years we have lost the trust between us, and now we are in a period where we can renew that trust.”