When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from Beirut, Syria was a mix of delightful chaos and state-imposed monotony. Christians, Druze, Alawis, and Jews were free to practice their faiths. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, alcohol was legal. Women not only drove cars, they worked in offices, shops, and restaurants. Some chose to wear headscarves, but many chose not to.

At the same time, billboards reminded citizens of their duty to the Baath Party’s founding motto: unity, freedom, socialism. Children wore military-style uniforms at school, and informants spied on their neighbors. The image of Hafez al-Assad, who had been president for just over two years, was ubiquitous. When I visited Damascus some months later, protesters threw eggs at a foreign dignitary. I asked my philosophy tutor at the American University back in Beirut whether he thought the Syrian government approved. “If the Baath Party doesn’t want people to throw eggs,” he said, “the chickens don’t lay eggs.”

That was the Syria I came to know over fifty years, through wars, attempted coups, the death of Hafez, and the accession of his son Bashar. It seemed unchanging, unchangeable, even throughout fourteen years of civil war. And then, on December 8 last year, it all changed. Assad was gone.

Taking his throne in the palace where he had presided for twenty-four years was Ahmed al-Sharaa, the forty-two-year-old leader of the Islamist militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Known previously by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, he began his career as a foot soldier with Al Qaeda in Iraq. After being captured by U.S. troops in 2006 and released in 2011, he and six Al Qaeda comrades infiltrated his home country of Syria in the early months of the Arab Spring protests, helping to transform the uprising against Assad from a campaign for democracy into a holy war.

Sharaa moved back to Iraq shortly before his mentor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the Islamic State’s caliphate, but quickly returned to Syria to resume the fight against Assad. In 2016, the tide of the war turned in the government’s favor. Its army, with Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah support, pushed the jihadis back to the last rebel stronghold, Idlib province, in the far north, where Sharaa formed a so-called Salvation Government, which ruled over some four million Syrians. The war, while still bloody, became a stalemate.

So it might have remained but for Hamas’s ill-judged rampage on October 7, 2023, and the decision by Hezbollah to attack Israel on behalf of Gaza’s beleaguered Palestinians. Thus began a chain of events that allowed Sharaa to advance into regime territory: Israel’s eradication of Iranian and Hezbollah assets in Syria and Lebanon; its destruction of Hezbollah’s weapons systems; and the assassination of hundreds of Hezbollah members, followed by that of most of its leaders, including its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, in September 2024. The removal of Hezbollah and Iran from the Syrian battlefield, combined with the diversion of Russia’s attention from Syria to Ukraine, exposed Assad’s weakness. Sharaa struck. On November 27, HTS and allied groups probed Syrian Army defenses west of Aleppo and pushed through them with little opposition. Taking the city, they moved south to Homs, Hama, and, within two weeks, Damascus. Syria was theirs.

When I drove into the country from Lebanon a week later, there were only two HTS fighters to wave me through at the border and no one in the vandalized buildings to stamp my passport. The dozen or so government checkpoints I had passed on previous trips during the war were unmanned; I reached the city in an unprecedented twenty minutes. The Iranian consulate on the right of the Mezze Highway lay in ruins, and the embassy next door was gutted and streaked with soot from arsonists’ flames. Old posters of the Assads had been burned or otherwise defaced. The windows of the television station in Umayyad Square were smashed, and a new, three-star flag fluttered on the roof. Apart from that, the city looked the same as it always had.

My first stop the next morning was an antique shop within the stone walls of the old city. Named for its original proprietor, George Dabdoub Antiques contains a trove of Ottoman brass chandeliers, icons, ceramics, ancient crucifixes, mother-of-pearl chests, and hand-forged jewelry in gold, silver, jade, and emerald. The shop’s current owner, Salim Hamadani, was seated, as always, like a contented Buddha, beside a mountain of Persian carpets. Throughout each political crisis in Syria, he had remained unshaken: “Nothing to worry about. Everything will be fine.” But now, for the first time in his life, his rulers were Islamist fundamentalists, and if anyone had cause for concern, it was him. After all, Salim is Jewish, a member of a community that predates the Arab conquest in the seventh century but has since diminished over the past sixty years from many thousands to fewer than ten aged souls. Even so, Salim approved of the transformation. “Things are much better,” he told me. “More free.”

It did not worry him that Syria’s new rulers were jihadis whose doctrine condemned Jews along with Christians and Shias. Whatever the fundamentalists had said or done in the past, their behavior and rhetoric during their first weeks in power seemed to indicate a softening of their hostility toward non-Sunnis. “We can smell the freedom,” Salim said. “Now you can talk about politics.” In the past, I had refrained from quoting Salim by name to spare him possible arrest. But with the disappearance of the detested Mukhabarat intelligence services, he told me to write anything I liked. “No problem.” Over an obligatory cup of Turkish coffee, he mentioned he hadn’t so much as been approached by HTS. Another member of the Jewish community, Khodor Kabariti, had become the intermediary between fellow Jews and the jihadis. “They have been very friendly with him,” Salim assured me.

The Assads had claimed to protect all the minorities in Syria—their own Alawi community as well as Jews, Christians, Ismailis, Druze, and Kurds. State propaganda inculcated the notion that their secular regime was the sole barrier between the minorities and annihilation by Islamist fanatics. The Islamist opposition had done little to counter that narrative with their slogan “Alawis to the grave, Christians to Beirut.” The Islamic State’s genocide of the Yazidi people, enslavement and rape of non-Muslim women, burning alive of Christians and Alawis, and other atrocities only reinforced minorities’ fears.

Salim did not seem concerned, and jihadi fanaticism was nowhere visible when I left his shop. Arriving at the plaza at the entrance to the Umayyad Mosque, Islam’s fourth-holiest site after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, I encountered a carnival of celebration. Men and women were removing their shoes and filing into the vast mosque that, until the year 634, had been the church of St. John the Baptist and, before that, a Roman temple. Some had come into the city from country districts for the first time in years. The bumpkins stood out in the metropolis, whose merchants were ready to fleece them. A photographer was charging parents for pictures of their children atop a beribboned quarter horse in the middle of the plaza. HTS fighters, AK-47s dangling from their shoulders, posed alongside the families. Fresh from the rural north, the soldiers looked more wary of the locals than the locals were of them, but they seemed to be adapting. A Christian friend of mine asked a group of them whether they preferred Damascus to Idlib. One of them answered, “We see unusual things here, like women’s hair.”

Friday prayers at Umayyad Mosque

At the top of the square, a Roman arch marked the eastern entrance to the vast Souk Hamidiyah, its corrugated iron vault shielding shoppers from the sun. The old bookstalls on the right looked just as they had at any time over the past fifty years. Qur’ans and old manuscripts remained in dusty heaps on the sidewalk and on shelves inside, but the Baath Party tracts and Assad hagiographies had vanished. The stalls that a year ago sold kitschy regime merchandise—Bashar Assad’s image on coffee cups and plates alongside that of Putin or Nasrallah, or alone in an officer’s uniform and aviator glasses, or in tailored civvies—were now hawking pennants, scarves, badges, and even polished driftwood featuring the liberators’ three-star flag. Pictures of Sharaa were nowhere to be seen.

The entire six hundred and fifty yards of Hamidiyah’s broad concourse was jammed with the full medley of Syrian society: a teenage boy with the hint of a beard, women in white, women in black, old men in keffiyehs, children with balloons, and young and old couples strolling. The armed, bearded liberators from Idlib mingled merrily with shoppers and queued beside children at Bakdash, Hamidiyah’s foremost ice-cream parlor since 1895. Their friendliness in the souk, on the streets, and at the rare checkpoint belied their reputation for ferocity. People returned their smiles; some patted them on their backs to wish them well.

Yet there were other HTS regulars on patrol as well, dressed in black from their leather boots to the cloths concealing their faces. If they were smiling, it was impossible to tell. No one slapped them on the back.

One shopkeeper I spoke with was hesitant about the new order. “We are happy he’s gone,” he said, meaning Assad, “but we don’t like this. . . .” He rubbed his chin to indicate a beard. Although a Sunni, he didn’t welcome bearded jihadis any more than he had the unshaved Hezbollah militiamen from Lebanon who had until recently manned checkpoints near his shop. The six or seven hundred Syrian Shias who lived in his quarter of Damascus, he said, had already departed. “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham told them to stay,” he told me, “but they were afraid.” How justified was this fear, when Sharaa was reassuring Shias, along with other minorities and secular Sunnis, that they would be secure?

Back in the old city, a few days later, a friend led me along a narrow, circling path to a house whose blank stucco wall disguised the majesty within. We entered an open courtyard overflowing with winter flowers and citrus trees, where at least a hundred people had gathered under the clear sky for a homecoming. Our hosts, a family who had fled Syria at the beginning of the civil war in 2011, had just returned. The lady of the house embraced old friends—fellow Sunnis as well as Alawis and Christians—some of whom had, like her, stayed away from the country to avoid prison, and others who had remained through the entire ordeal. Our hostess was seeing many of them for the first time in thirteen years, shedding not a few tears.

Wearing dark slacks and a loose green jacket, her hair flowing, she grabbed a microphone to declare that Syria was free. They were free. More speeches followed, with women among the most outspoken. An orchestra in the liwan, or loggia, began to play, and the dancing commenced. The refrains of one number all ended with the words Suriye hurra—Syria is free. Women and girls, the new flag draped over their shoulders like shawls, clapped and twirled amid tables piled high with delicious shawarma, sweet baklava, and fresh fruits. Watching them celebrate with such abandon, I wondered whether Assad knew how much his people hated him. There was genuine joy here, as people raised glasses of fruit juice to toast their freedom. (“If you want a real drink, come inside,” one family member told me.)

Outside the old Damascene courtyard, however, opinion was mixed. “When the other regime left, we felt free,” an Alawi student at Damascus University told me. “We also felt fear.” Many were afraid of thieves who robbed houses and cars in the absence of a fully staffed police force. Others feared uncertainty. “The fear is that Israel will kill [Sharaa] and plunge Syria into a ten-year war,” a Sunni businessman told me. Several friends were afraid that Assad would return and reimpose his reign. To others, the greatest threat was HTS’s Islamist fundamentalism. Women of all sects told me they did not want to end up oppressed like Afghan women under the Taliban.

An old friend I’ll call Walid expressed particular concern about his own community, the Druze people. Their sect had grown out of Shia Islam in the eleventh century and suffered Ottoman persecution for its heterodox beliefs. They fought in the Arab Revolt against Turkey during World War I and afterward led rebellions against French rule. In 2011, they refused to take sides in the civil war. Although they distrusted Assad, they were more concerned with Sunni jihadis from Daraa, a city near the Druze stronghold of Suweida. Throughout the war, Daraa’s fundamentalists had harassed and attacked the Druze, and yet, after Assad fled, Druze fighters found themselves entering Damascus alongside their jihadi former enemies. For two days, the groups looted the city’s wealthier quarters, including United Nations food stores, the compound of the Damascus Opera House, embassies, and ambassadors’ homes. One diplomat told me that the only embassy left untouched was the American one. When HTS arrived from Homs and restored order, the Druze and Daraa fighters withdrew.

Posters detailing missing prisoners at an entrance to Sednaya prison, December 21, 2024

Walid said that HTS had not yet entered Druze territory, but Sharaa was ordering its people to disarm. “Druze don’t want to give their weapons to anyone,” he said. “If HTS insists on that, Israel will immediately take the area.” He was referring to the fact that on December 8, Israel had sent troops into and beyond the buffer zone between Syria and Israel that Henry Kissinger had helped negotiate in 1974. Benjamin Netanyahu was portraying himself as a defender of the Druze, even though most Druze reject his offers of protection and resent an Israeli presence in their villages. After all, during the civil war, Israel had given aid to the very jihadis who had attacked them.

Walid insisted that most Druze wanted to remain Syrian. A positive sign to him was Sharaa’s appointment of a Druze woman, Muhsina al-Mahithawi, as governor of Suweida. “Don’t judge him in his first days,” he counseled. “If he puts his history aside and works for the Syrian community, he will be good.” But not all of Sharaa’s followers shared his vision, Walid feared. He recounted the experience of a woman without a headscarf at a roadside checkpoint. “One HTS guy told her she could not go through again looking like that. She said, ‘Jolani [Sharaa] said I could.’ He said, ‘Jolani is not here.’”

As Syrian Christians prepared for Christmas, fundamentalists burned a Christmas tree in the small town of Suqaylabiyah. Hundreds of Damascene Christians reacted by marching in protest through the old city bearing large wooden crosses. HTS denied the accusation that its fighters were involved, replaced the tree, and told the Christians to celebrate their holiday as usual, which everyone seemed to do. A few days before Christmas, the Armenian Catholic Church on Qnayet al-Hatab Street near Bab Touma—Thomas Gate—staged an evening concert of classical, Arabic, and modern music. Well-dressed Christian families packed the pews and stood in the aisles. The program opened with flute and oboe concertos. A women’s choir with a few men in the back row took to the altar and chanted hymns in Arabic. They also sang “Silent Night,” the first verse in English, the next two in Arabic and Armenian. A soloist with an angelic voice intoned the sublime poetry of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” This was the Syria to which many aspired: an Armenian woman singing a Canadian Jewish composer’s canticle in Arabic.

On Christmas Eve, Damascus’s Christian Quarter came alive with bright lights, processions, singing, balloons, and fireworks. Santa Clauses distributed sweets to children, and the new HTS governor of Damascus, Maher Marwan, glad-handed Christians in the streets, hailing their celebrations. A Syrian television crew recorded his promenade and his apparently grateful reception from surprised Christian passers-by.

Father Firas Lutfi, the Franciscan pastor at St. Paul’s Church in the old city, was among the skeptics of HTS’s volte-face toward sectarian tolerance. Born into a small Roman Catholic community in the city of Hama, he was ordained in 2013 and studied at the Jesuits’ Gregorian University in Rome before taking up his post in Damascus. The only leaders Father Lutfi had ever known were named Assad, and he did not lament Bashar’s removal. “His oppression, his violence, and his capture of all of Syria were very corrupt,” he told me. “It was fifty years of oppression.”

While embracing the demise of the old regime, Father Lutfi had reservations about the new one. All of Sharaa’s cabinet ministers, for instance, were fundamentalists who had worked with him in the Salvation Government that had administered Idlib province according to sharia law since 2017. “This is not a good look,” Father Lutfi said. “It needs ladies and men, Christians and Sunnis and Druze and Alawis.” He told me that Sharaa had sent a representative to his church to reassure Catholic and Orthodox clerics that their flocks would be safe. The representative promised that military rule would be abolished, but added that, in constitutional matters, “Islamic law would guide us.”

For Father Lutfi, the idea of reweaving Syria’s social fabric according to a one-dimensional Sunni fundamentalist pattern seemed impossible. “Who will be the judge of all those who have blood on their hands?” he asked. “Syria needs justice, not vengeance.” HTS was arresting murderers, torturers, and rapists from the old regime, but none from its own ranks. It invited journalists to inspect Assad’s prisons in Sednaya and Damascus, where there was ample evidence of unimaginable cruelty and mass murder, yet denied them access to its own prisons in Idlib.

Father Lutfi longed for a Syria where Christians felt secure. They had been here since the birth of their faith. Although their numbers had not declined as dramatically as that of Syria’s Jews, they too were leaving. “There were two million Christians here before 2011,” he said. “Now there are fewer than five hundred thousand in the whole country.” (Some estimates put the number as low as 250,000.) His parish had shrunk to a few hundred souls, most of whom, he admitted, had been looking for ways to emigrate. This was something I heard frequently from Christian prelates—that a mass exodus was imminent. “I’ll tell you something,” one bishop said to me. “If you write it, I’ll deny I said it. Nobody will leave tomorrow, but everyone is planning to leave in a year or two.”

As Father Lutfi walked me out of the church, I thought of July 1860, when Muslim mobs slaughtered five thousand Christians over eight days of rioting and plunder. Arsonists reduced most of the Christian Quarter to ash. Women were abducted and raped. It scarred the city for generations.

When I asked Father Lutfi if today’s Christians remembered 1860, he stopped abruptly and pointed at the polished marble floor at the foot of the altar. “The massacre happened right here! Eleven men were slaughtered on this spot.” The eleven were eight Franciscan friars and three Maronite Catholic laymen, whom Pope Francis canonized in October of last year. Yes, they remembered.

A short walk from St. Paul’s Church is a small park called the Syriac Martyrs Gardens. A stone memorial at the entrance declares for the glory of god and in commemoration of the martyrs of the syriac genocide sayfo. Sayfo is the SyriacAramaic word for “sword,” and a bas-relief depicts swords in the hands of Ottoman soldiers butchering Syriac Christians in 1915, when anywhere between a quarter million and a half million of them were killed. I passed the memorial on my way along Bab Sharqi Street to St. Sarkis Church, the bishopric of a people who were slaughtered in even greater numbers between 1914 and 1918: the Armenians.

Bishop Armash Nalbandian, primate of the Armenian diocese of Damascus, received me in his rectory’s office, which, despite a glimmer of sunlight peeping through the window, was as dark as a confessional. The power supply was sporadic at best. As one teacher told me, electricity in Damascus is “a visitor who comes for two hours a day.” The prelate’s family shared with other Armenians a legacy of trauma from Turkey’s massacre of more than 1.5 million of their people during the First World War. The bishop’s grandparents had survived the Turkish death marches to find refuge in Aleppo, Syria’s ancient commercial capital, where he was born. “We witnessed a new kind of Islam,” he said. “We were welcomed.”

The number of Armenians in Syria swelled over the subsequent decades: twenty-five years ago, Syrian Armenians numbered about 100,000. But that figure has steadily dwindled, especially after the onset of the civil war. Officially, between 30,000 and 35,000 of them remain, though the bishop feared the real figure might be closer to 18,000. “I can’t blame anyone,” he said of those who left.

HTS members guard men accused of posing as HTS fighters and looting residences, December 23, 2024

For those who remained, their greatest fear remained Turkey, rather than HTS. Throughout the civil war, Turkey had been HTS’s staunchest benefactor, supplying it with weapons, funding, logistics, and intelligence. The Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization chief until 2023, even admitted to having clandestinely supervised HTS’s intelligence operations, despite the group’s being designated by the United Nations as a terrorist organization, making such cooperation illegal under international law. Already, Turkish government ministers were paying regular visits to Sharaa in the former presidential palace. Having withdrawn from Syria in 1918, Turkey was once again exerting its influence, and Armenians were nervous. “They don’t need to give this dominance to Turkey,” the bishop said.

Like Father Lutfi, the bishop was pleased that Assad had left, and looked forward to having an opportunity to vote, which Sharaa was promising after a four-year transition period. The bishop had also attended the session with the HTS representative at St. Paul’s. “We heard beautiful words and promises that we would be protected,” he said. But the bishop was hoping for more than mere protection. “We are asking to have our voice in the writing of the new constitution, to have a place in the new government, to demand and protect the rights of every citizen in Syria.” I asked him whether HTS seemed to be listening. “Not yet,” he said.

The bishop and I recalled a trip we had taken together to Kessab, Syria’s only majority-Armenian village, in September 2014. A few months earlier, artillery shells had rained down from the Turkish side of the border. Jihadis belonging to Jabhat al-Nusra—a Syrian branch of Al Qaeda—poured into town, which they occupied and despoiled for two months. By June, international outrage, including statements from the ArmenianAmerican Kim Kardashian and the U.S. Congress, led Turkey to order the militants to withdraw and the country to brand the Nusra Front a terrorist organization. Two years later, when Nusra combined with other jihadi groups to form HTS, Turkey resumed its cooperation.

The bishop and I had found Kessab devastated. Nusra forces burned churches, smashed pianos, and looted houses and hotels. A painting commemorating the genocide in the local Protestant church, depicting Christ cradling a dying child in his arms amid a field of skulls, was gone. Jihadi fighters had scrawled graffiti on the church walls: soldiers of the only one were here. god willing, we will crush the christians, armenians, and alawis . . . do not rejoice, christians. we will step on you.

If the Armenians and other Christians were afraid of what HTS rule might have in store, another community was terrified: the Alawis. Constituting about a tenth of the Syrian population, they practice an esoteric form of Shia Islam. Many Syrians blame them for the crimes of the Assad regime. Like his father, Assad had enlisted his coreligionists as soldiers, spies, and bureaucrats. Their casualty rate in the civil war was higher than among any other sect. About a third of military-age Alawi men were killed. The Alawis I knew nursed a deeper hatred of Assad than did the Sunnis. “In my opinion,” one Alawi woman, a mother of five, told me, “Bashar al-Assad could have saved his people if he left in 2011. We were just fuel for this conflict. He let the war happen. We burned, and he left.” To devout Sunnis, the Assads were heretics and thus illegitimate. To the Alawis, they were worse. They were traitors.

The Alawis first came to power in 1963, when a group of Baath Party military officers seized control of the government in a coup. Seven years later, the defense minister, Hafez al-Assad, overthrew his fellow junta members to assume sole control. Beginning in the early Eighties, the elder Assad invited Alawi peasants to the capital to work for the government. They built a slum of flimsy cinder-block houses, one on top of another, on a rocky hillside in the western suburb of Mezze. The area was dubbed Mezze 86, after a paramilitary brigade under the command of the elder Assad’s bloodthirsty brother Rifaat that was stationed nearby. Today, the best estimates put the population of Mezze 86 at around 200,000 people, crammed into one square kilometer, half the size of Monaco.

Sunni and Christian friends used to warn me against visiting Mezze 86. The Alawis were wild, they said. They would rob me. But it wasn’t true. The Alawis who invited me to their homes in Mezze 86 were hospitable and generous. They were also house-proud. While the exteriors were dismal—bare cement blocks, stairways out of an Escher drawing, barely paved streets—the interiors were invariably clean and thoughtfully furnished. “We are very poor, but we are kind and hopeful and beautiful,” an Alawi university instructor told me when I visited her family in late December. (I’ll call them the Barakats, and withhold their first names, to spare them possible reprisals.)

Armed HTS militants at every entrance to Mezze 86, firing shots into the air, reminded the Alawis they were being watched. My taxi failed to find the Barakats’ house in the confusing warren of interchangeable tenements, but the family came outside to greet us. Scrambling past rubble from recent Israeli bombardments, they took me up several flights of exposed, crumbling steps to their front door and into a well-ordered household. With their adolescent children and some cousins beside them, they offered me tea, cakes, and insights into their lives.

When the insurrection erupted in 2011, many Sunni officers defected to the opposition. In response, Assad conscripted Alawis into the army to fight for what he called their survival against a Sunni jihadi onslaught promising to annihilate them as kafirs, or nonbelievers. Criminal gangs of Alawi young men from Tartus and Latakia—called shabiha, “ghosts”—matched the jihadis’ ruthlessness.

The Barakats urged me to understand that not all Alawis had supported the Assads. Some had actively opposed them. One of the Barakat daughters, a twenty-year-old student, refused even to speak Assad’s name as she condemned him: “The former regime tried to make us slaves and told us we would die without them.” “Assad committed many crimes,” added another daughter. “But it doesn’t mean all Alawis are responsible.” The public impression, however, was that Alawis benefitted from Assad’s rule and fought for him.

However the Barakats felt about the former regime, they deplored the excesses of the new regime: three Alawi judges had been murdered, an Alawi shrine near Aleppo had been burned down, and threats against Alawis in their workplaces and schools were widespread. “Boys at the university threatened us ten Alawi girls,” said one family member. “They threatened to kill us.” The Barakats’ son showed me a picture of two young men on his cell phone. “When the old regime left, the new regime took guns from people who were in the army. They said they would protect them,” he told me. “Two brothers—one was in the army for only one year, and his younger brother not even one year—they gave in their guns. A car took them. The next day, the family found them killed, with their throats cut, and thrown in the trash in their street.”

The Barakats feared they and their neighbors would be caught up in the mania for retribution, despite Sharaa’s claim that HTS was attempting to prevent and investigate the killings. The idea that Alawis were a privileged class persisted. Over the years, I had been to many Alawi villages, and mostly encountered peasants eking out a living on a few acres of olive, pistachio, or apple orchards. Assad had not enriched any of them apart from members of his extended family. Since he fled to Moscow, they have become even poorer, as thousands lost their jobs in the army and civil service. Mrs. Barakat hoped her children would emigrate: “I tell my children to learn languages to be able to go abroad,” she said. “They need a future.”

We climbed up to the roof of the Barakats’ building, where we looked out over dilapidated high-rise structures that seemed as though they might collapse in a light wind. On one promontory a cluster of pines concealed a modern villa. “That was Rifaat’s house,” Mrs. Barakat said, referring to Bashar’s uncle. Another summit formerly housed Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s younger brother, an army commander famous for extorting bribes at checkpoints and torturing his opponents. The two Assads, uncle and nephew, had enjoyed the view below of their subjects, whom they kept dependent by keeping them poor. They were not missed.

Before leaving Syria, I had dinner in an upmarket restaurant with an old friend. I told him about all I had seen, good and bad, of Sharaa and his fellow rebels. It was confusing. They had blood on their hands, perhaps not as much as Assad, but a troubling legacy nevertheless. They had sworn in years past to impose sharia law and make the country a pure Islamist state. They now claimed to have turned the page, promising all communities a stake in the new Syria. They were not preventing the restaurant from serving us wine. I had come no closer to determining whether continued fear was justified while Sharaa assured minorities and secular Sunnis that they would be secure. I asked my friend what he thought, and he considered my question for a moment before answering: “These people did not fight for fourteen years just so I could vote.”

After I left Syria, in early January, I stayed in touch with friends there. Some highlighted what they saw as positive developments: the Kurdish administration in the northeast, which had been autonomous since 2012, regained its state jurisdiction; the European Union relaxed a number of its anti-Assad economic sanctions; several European and Arab states pledged some $6.5 billion dollars in aid to Syria’s war-crippled economy. On March 29, Sharaa announced his new government. It included a Christian woman, Hind Kabawat, as minister of labor. Some of the other appointees had degrees from Georgetown and other Western universities. A Christian businessman I’ve known for many years left a voice message saying he had met the new ministers and calling them “very nice people.”

Not all the news was as encouraging. Some friends sent reports of Sunni gunmen killing Alawis in villages in the northwest, and videos of trucks trundling through Damascus with loudspeakers ordering Christians to convert to Islam or die. Others shared copies of government directives: one prohibiting the sale of alcohol in some sixty bars that had operated for years without government licenses (this was rescinded twenty-four hours after it was issued), and another ordering Alawis to surrender their personal weapons (so far, not rescinded). Then came images via Telegram, Signal, and WhatsApp of corpses on roadsides, in burning houses, and in mass graves.

The daily stream of messages included a report that Alawi families were seeking safety from jihadis in the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Latakia, a city on the Mediterranean coast. The convent’s Franciscan pastor, Father Fadi Azar, told the Vatican’s Radio Maria, “People are terrified. We call on the international community to intervene, provide asylum or at least protection.” The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, as recently as of April 7, says it has recorded the deaths of “481 people, including eight women and seven children, in murder crimes and eliminations that come under retaliatory actions in different Syrian provinces since early 2025.”

On April 9, I received a message from an Alawi friend in Damascus: “Groups of individuals launched a violent attack on the homes of Alawite civilians in the Mazzeh neighborhood of Damascus, pelting them with stones and causing fear and panic among the residents. It is worth mentioning that attempts were made to contact the security forces, but there has been no response or intervention to protect the civilians.” The family I visited in Mezze 86 confirmed the report. “It doesn’t matter, we adapted,” they added with resignation.

Many Syrians I know appealed for me to help them obtain visas or scholarships abroad for their children. A Christian friend in Aleppo forwarded a plea from “all the Christian people in Syria to our people in the great United States of America.” It addressed President Trump directly: “We also ask you, Mr. President, to hasten to save us, the Christians in Syria. We suffer daily from terrorism, from the domination of our property and its theft, and terrorizing us in the streets, and the killing of our sons and the assault on our villages, homes, daughters, churches, and all our sanctities [sanctuaries].” A Sunni friend in Aleppo sent me what was the most surprising message. When I saw him in December, his enthusiasm for the new regime had been infectious. For the first time in his life, he socialized openly with a foreign journalist without having to face questions later from security thugs. While walking me around Aleppo’s ancient Citadel, he had stopped to thank a policeman for directing traffic, appreciative of the new order he represented. This was why the note my friend sent me in April was so troubling: “It is now worse than old times,” he wrote. “Difference is people are getting killed for their opinions rather than being taken to prison.” He is now looking for a country, any country, that will take him in and let him work.

Some of my Druze friends, too, were worried. In March, Sharaa dismissed Muhsina al-Mahithawi, the Druze woman he had initially appointed as governor of Suweida, and replaced her with Mustafa al-Bakour, a Sunni man. On March 7, a newly formed “Military Council” of Druze gathered outside the governor’s offices in Suweida to demand Bakour’s removal. Protesters brandished images of Sheikh Muafaq Tarif, the religious head of the Druze in Israel, prompting suspicions that Israel—which had occupied nearby territory and bombed Syrian military bases that Turkey was evaluating for its own use—was behind the demonstrations. A counterprotest by another new group, Madafat al-Karama (Men of Dignity), exposed fissures in the Druze community between those welcoming and those opposing the new regime.

The war that appeared to end in December has metamorphosed into myriad conflicts. Minority communities—Alawis, Ismailis, Druze, and Christians—are struggling against Islamic fundamentalist hostility. Turkey and Israel are vying for dominance, and Iran has not reconciled itself to its loss of influence in Syria. Russia operates naval and air bases in the country with diplomatic support from Israel, and the United States maintains roughly 1,000 American troops stationed with the Kurds. President Trump’s embrace of Sharaa in Saudi Arabia, removal of economic sanctions, and reopening of the American Embassy in Damascus are hints that Syria has become America’s newest ally in the Middle East—with all the dangers that entails for both countries. Amid all this turmoil, the most sensible opinion on the country’s future has come from an unexpected quarter: Trump’s senior director of counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka. “If anyone tells you they know the future of Syria,” he told Brietbart News, “they are a liar.”