The end of the 54-year rule of Syria’s Assad regime came so quickly that many refused to believe it.

“I started getting calls around six in the morning, saying that it’s true, Bashar (al-Assad) is gone,” says Ibrahim Othman, a 37-year-old economist in the city of al-Tal, seven kilometres from central Damascus.

“I waited for a few hours, trying to process it and confirm that it had really happened. Then I went down to his palace and saw for myself,” he says.

Othman was one of the first into Assad’s former family home, walking around only hours after the Syrian president fled to Moscow. He managed to grab a handful of personal photographs from one of the boxes documenting the Assad family and their lifestyle. From weddings to birthdays and even beach visits, the photos were never meant to be seen by anyone other than the former president’s family.

“This one is my favourite,” grins Othman, showing a photo of Assad on a jet ski.

Sitting in the foothills of the Qalamoun Mountains that stretch out northeast of Damascus, al-Tal was one of the very first places to experience major protests against the Assad regime. When the Syrian revolt broke out amid the Arab Spring in March 2011, this unremarkable small town quickly became one of its hubs. 

“Al-Tal was one of the first cities to revolt against Assad,” says Ayham al-Ahman, a 29-year-old local pharmacist. “The very first were Daraa, in the south, and Douma, just a few kilometres to the east of here. We started protesting on March 25, 2011, about ten days later,” he says.

That date is one of several often considered the starting point of Syria’s revolution. As the Arab Spring swept across the region, from its origins in Tunisia to the authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Libya, the Assad regime bought itself a few more weeks than its neighbours. But even the heavily consolidated police state in Damascus could not withstand the tide forever - although it did try.

As protests spread across the country in 2011, the Assad regime quickly lost its ability to confront them everywhere. By the end of the year, areas were falling out of government control entirely. Among them was al-Tal, setting the stage for a more direct confrontation in mid-2012.

“Al-Tal was on the route to smuggle arms to [Eastern] Ghouta,” says Othman, describing the stretch of suburbs east of Damascus that became a crucial rebel stronghold as the opposition fought to enter the Syrian capital. “The government wanted to retake control, but the local regime security chief here was less brutal than in other towns. He only used rubber bullets at the start, so we had an easier time for a while,” he says.

But the conflict would soon escalate. Syrian rebels launched an all-out offensive to take Damascus in July 2012. Nicknamed ‘Operation Damascus Volcano,’ it was eventually beaten back by government forces, but a number of towns remained rebel-held - including al-Tal.

“The first major battle here happened in July 2012,” al-Ahman says. “The Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters here surrounded the regime’s political intelligence centre - a big building in the centre of town. The guys there put up a good fight, but they were forced to surrender. The regime was still busy with the battles in central Damascus at that time, so they did not have the men to retake the town, but they found enough resources to bomb us. They started hitting al-Tal heavily with helicopters, for the first time. In the next month, 300 people were killed,” he says.

That round of fighting ended in an uneasy stalemate. Al-Tal had been successfully freed from Assad’s control, but it was still surrounded, with army checkpoints on all sides. The situation would persist for three years, with residents hardly able to leave the town and suffering from a total lack of electricity for six straight months at one point.

The scenario in al-Tal would play out similarly across most of the rest of the country in the late 2010s. Backed by Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) fighters and Russian jets, Assad would slowly claw back most of Syria’s population centres, crushing rebel resistance in the city of Aleppo in December 2016 and in the remaining contested districts of Damascus by mid-2018.

The ‘victory,’ however, would not bring stability but would crush poverty and ever-greater levels of government predation.

“The economic situation started to get really bad only after 2020, when the sanctions took effect,” says Othman, speaking of the ‘Caesar’ sanctions adopted by the United States at that time. “The exchange rate completely collapsed - at the start of 2020, it was about SYP1,000 to one dollar. By the end of the year, it was SYP3,000, and a year after that, SYP7,000. Last year, it cost SYP15,000 to get a single dollar,” he says. The prewar exchange rate, for comparison, had been 50 to one.

The economic implosion meant that even the regime’s ubiquitous military and intelligence services, always corrupt, became ever more synonymous with extortion and theft. For conscripts serving their miserable mandatory military service, it became quite literally a matter of life and death.

“There was a big checkpoint at the entrance to al-Tal,” al-Ahman says. “I knew some of the young guys stationed there, the conscripts. Their food ration per day was half a potato and maybe a few pieces of bread. They had to either get food donated by nearby restaurants, or to extort it from people they stopped at the checkpoint. They would not have eaten otherwise,” he says.

In these conditions, morale unsurprisingly collapsed. Even mid-level army officers could barely survive on their meagre - and increasingly worthless - salaries. Against this backdrop, the shocking collapse of Assad’s forces - losing the entire country in just 11 days - is much more understandable.

“When the rebel offensive happened, I think that just about everyone in the army asked themselves, ‘why should I fight? To defend whom?”, Othman explains. “Everyone’s lives were just miserable and getting worse all the time. If you weren’t at the very top, you were getting absolutely nothing. I wouldn’t fight then, either,” he says. 

In the end, al-Tal - and the rest of Syria - are now under the control of the new al-Sharaa regime in Damascus, which swept to power from Idlib. While the country still faces incredible challenges from the years of war, it appears to be moving in the right direction.