In the early hours of 8 December, a single plane lifted off from Damascus. On board was Bashar al-Assad, bound for exile in Russia — most likely Moscow.
With that departure, more than half a century of Assad rule came to an end, a dynasty that began when his father seized power in 1970. But the end of a ruler is not the end of his shadow. Within hours, the gates of Syria’s most feared prisons stood open. People stepped inside chambers that had lived for decades in rumour and nightmare. Photographs from Sednaya Prison — bare walls, dim light, the heavy absence of the disappeared — showed the world the shape of cruelty made into architecture.

The scale of Syria’s loss is beyond the reach of ordinary numbers. Deaths, detainees, refugees, children killed, homes reduced to dust — each counted in numbers with at least five zeros, and sometimes six. And beyond the statistics are the images no one can unsee: the lifeless child on a beach, the body pulled from the rubble, the family drifting in an open sea.

Assad’s power was not only in his prisons. It seeped into art and religion, into the Palestinian cause, into the economy and the nation’s schools. It was a dictatorship that taught people to measure every word, to weigh every glance, to gather in the knowledge that they were always being watched. It was the slow, relentless reshaping of a nation’s inner life.

This issue — more than 200 pages — traces that story: from the early years of Assad’s rise to the suffocating reach of the mukhabarat; from culture under control to the collapse of the economy; from classrooms remade as instruments of propaganda to the small spaces where resistance endured. It closes with two final portraits: one on how WhatsApp became the thread holding together a scattered people in Assad’s final years, and another on the difficult questions of transitional justice in the uncertain time after his fall.

This is the legacy the Assads left behind — a regime that buried Syria’s past, shattered its present, and left behind ruins so deep that its future is more likely to inherit its darkness than escape it.

The issue is Syria, told in the words of Syrians — a rare space for Syrians to speak of their own country, past and present. — a rare space for Syrians to speak of their own country, past and present.
This issue was made possible through our collaboration with Syria Untold, to whom we offer our gratitude here on the front page.