On the morning the regime fell, Rashid Saad left his house before dawn and stepped onto the road outside Al-Rusafa, a village in Syria's Alawite heartland along the Mediterranean coast. Cars clogged the road in every direction, overloaded with people and their belongings.
It was bitterly cold, but that is not what he remembers most. “There was a kind of fear,” he said. “Of something unknown.”
Life in the village had never been easy. Rashid was poor, and work was hard to find. But under Bashar al-Assad, Alawites like him didn’t worry for their safety. “That was what mattered most,” he said.
In Damascus and across much of Syria, the collapse of Assad’s government in December 2024 was greeted as liberation. After 13 years of civil war and more than half a century of Assad family rule, the regime’s fall offered a chance to rebuild a country long defined by repression, war, and economic crisis.
In the year that followed, some of that optimism appeared justified. More than a million Syrian refugees returned. Political prisoners were freed. Checkpoints that had strangled movement for years came down. Journalists began to criticize the new government. Western governments lifted sanctions and moved to engage with Syria's new leadership. Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, assured the United Nations that his government was creating “a state for all its citizens.”
For Syria’s minorities, however, the transition brought uncertainty. Al-Sharaa, previously known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had led Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria—a jihadist movement with a history of targeting non-Sunni communities. Christians, Druze, Kurds, and others watched cautiously, unsure what an Islamist-led government would mean for them. But for the Alawites—the sect from which the Assad family emerged—the question was more urgent: When power changes hands after decades, what becomes of the community once closest to it?
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