On December 8, 2024, the regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed. Soldiers abandoned their posts, throwing their boots and their uniforms away into the streets. The president and his near family fled the country via the Russian military base at Hmeimim. Across the country, and particularly in Syria’s south, members of the former regime scuttled, running to their safes to take out as much cash and gold as they could. Ministers and generals texted their wives, urging them to round up the family and all portable valuables and head for Latakia on the Mediterranean coast. Perhaps they might get a seat on a Russian transport plane, or a nice flat in Moscow.

In the year since, journalists have tracked some of these people down – those who fled the sinking ship. Many of them are now in Moscow.

Other former regime leaders had to leave the country in more difficult ways: braving roadblocks, crawling along strangely abandoned highways. Heading out via the Lebanese border, arriving in Beirut to hide in villas. Others are in the United Arab Emirates, threatening to sell their diaries or recollections to the global press; some are in Iraq, others in Iran.

Defeated though these people are, they’re not deserving of pity. They are the survivors of a ruthless system of tyranny, one that was controlled by competing intelligence services and military power bases who fought each other almost as viciously as they repressed the general population. By the time of its fall, the Assad regime, under father and son, was over 50 years old. The final 14 of those were defined by a vicious civil war in which as many as a million people were killed. It was a war in which the regime used chemical weapons against its targets – the three most deadly incidents being in Ghouta in August 2013, in Khan Sheikhun in April 2017, and in Douma in April 2018.

The regime’s war effort was significantly outsourced to militias and thugs. The National Defence Forces (NDF), an organised rabble previously called ‘the shabiha’ (thugs), were famous for their brutality and allegedly behind massacres at Houla and Al-Qubair. A favoured slogan of the NDF was ‘Assad or we burn the country’. Video footage collected during the war sometimes had soldiers of the regime, or its militiamen, insisting that captured or dying enemies affirm that ‘Bashar is your god’.

Rival intelligence agencies and militias divided up regime-held Syria. They arrested and tortured each other’s sources and proxies. They muscled in on each other’s turf. Generals became adept at factional in-fighting, managing sprawling archives of paperwork relating to phone-tapping and a vast network of informants. The secret police – the dreaded mukhabarat – were widely known. Syrian children learned to flee the boxy white vans they moved around in, while their parents told them not to say anything critical of the state in public, on the phone, in the open air, or before windows that were not closed.

The regime’s people collected tolls and protection money from businesses and passing vehicles at checkpoints; they maintained their own local smuggling rings and drug-trafficking operations, the latter of which became a significant international problem. As the regime hollowed out, its drug trade slowly began to dominate the region. Regime- and militia-controlled warehouses produced captagon, a cheap stimulant. Regime-patrolled roads sent lorryloads of the drug all the way to ports and to the country’s borders. Powerful regime figures and oligarchs had stakes in the drug trade. Their warehouses, their lorries, their people were behind its continual, metastatic growth.

Since the regime fell last December, tens of thousands have been released from its former prison archipelago. The most infamous of them all was the prison at Sednaya, nicknamed the ‘human slaughterhouse’. There, prisoners were beaten and starved and many executions without trial were allegedly carried out. Prisoners who left Sednaya described extreme overcrowding, widespread disease, and torture – sometimes including sexual violence – either for information or for the recreation of the guards. Even before Sednaya was liberated, it was described by international non-governmental organisations as a site of ‘extermination’.

Photographers working in prisons like Sednaya and the Mezzeh base of Air Force Intelligence documented thousands of emaciated corpses. One of those men was codenamed ‘Caesar’. It was only in February 2025, no longer fearing reprisals, that Caesar revealed his identity. His real name is Farid al-Madhan. As early as 2013, Caesar produced thousands of photographs of the dead and showed them to legislatures and campaigned abroad. Prison authorities said these men died of natural causes. In 2018, the Assad regime released death certificates for some of the 82,000 who had disappeared in prisons since 2011. None of these death certificates listed a likely cause.

Because Sednaya was so opaque, and because it was the source of so much rumour, its liberation was followed by many stories that did not turn out to be true. Relatives of those who, years before, had disappeared into the prison charged through cells and corridors, battering away at walls and floors with sledgehammers, trying to find the locations of what they believed to be hidden cells where occupants might be slowly starving to death. Those relatives were perhaps unwilling to accept that their relatives must be dead. Over 100,000 people were still missing in early 2025.

The dead in Syria often ended up – unmourned and unidentified – in mass graves. Many such sites, first identified by satellite, have been found and surveying has slowly begun.

As the result of early investigations, the mass grave at al-Qutayfah alone is thought to hold as many as 100,000 bodies. They will need to be collected, identified and returned to next of kin for reburial. This process will take years. Mass graves in neighbouring Iraq, also ruled by a Baathist tyranny for decades until its fall in 2003, were still being found in the 2020s. The work of identifying remains goes on.

As Syria’s new rulers slowly extend their power over the byzantine internal structures of the previous Baathist regime, the inner workings of the state have yielded inch by inch to the work of researchers and reporters. They’ve painted a picture of an Arab North Korea, with the Assads – father and son – akin to Syrian Ceaușescus, as a recent book by Rime al-Allaf, reporting on the Syria she knew in the 1980s and 1990s, has shown. Regime newspapers referred to the country as ‘Assad’s Syria’ and to Hafez al-Assad, even before his death in 2000, as an ‘eternal leader’.

Syria under the Assads was a militia-dominated, criminal state, its regime rotten to the core, the economy hollow under a leadership incapable of constructive governance, or even of keeping the lights on. Its elites were dependent on the drug trade and reliant on the proceeds of corruption. It is remarkable that it survived for as long as it did. But a year on from the fall of the regime, it is not so surprising that the regime fell in under two weeks of renewed fighting. The door was kicked in with new force, and the whole rotten house fell down.