The celebrations marking the fall of the Assad regime in Jobar, a city located east of Damascus, on Dec. 7, 2025. (Credit: Tea Ziade/L'Orient-Le Jour)
Tarek rubs his eyes. Is he dreaming, or has reality become more surreal than a dream? "I’ve never seen anything like this in my life," says the resident of Damascus’ old city as he gazes at the dense crowd gathered in front of the Umayyad Mosque to attend the dawn prayer. On Dec. 8, at 6 a.m., those who managed to enter the mosque are the lucky ones. “I arrived at 4 a.m., and it was already full,” says an old man with a long white beard. A year earlier, at dawn on Dec. 8, 2024, Abou Mohammad al-Jolani — Ahmad al-Sharaa’s nom de guerre — gave his first speech within the Damascus mosque’s enclosure after assuming the role of liberator. It has been a year since Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and the agents of the moukhabarat deserted their torture and execution centers, whose rare survivors were freed by fighters from Hay'at...
Tarek rubs his eyes. Is he dreaming, or has reality become more surreal than a dream? "I’ve never seen anything like this in my life," says the resident of Damascus’ old city as he gazes at the dense crowd gathered in front of the Umayyad Mosque to attend the dawn prayer. On Dec. 8, at 6 a.m., those who managed to enter the mosque are the lucky ones. “I arrived at 4 a.m., and it was already full,” says an old man with a long white beard. A year earlier, at dawn on Dec. 8, 2024, Abou Mohammad al-Jolani — Ahmad al-Sharaa’s nom de guerre — gave his first speech within the Damascus mosque’s enclosure after assuming the role of liberator. It has been a year since Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and the agents of the moukhabarat deserted their torture and execution centers, whose rare survivors were freed by fighters...