From Bashar al-Assad's abandoned palace to the site of one of the country's most horrific massacres, the ABC spent three days in Syria, uncovering the fallen dictator's secrets.
December 8, 2024 was a political earthquake for the Middle East.
After half a century of tyrannical rule, the Assad dynasty spectacularly crumbled.
Rebels swept through the country with stunning speed, meeting little resistance from Bashar al-Assad's men as they advanced further and further towards the capital, Damascus.
Once they reached the city gates, Assad fled for a new life in Moscow.
Syria now stands at a crossroads.
After years of civil war, mass surveillance by secret police, reprisal murders and disappearances, there is a tentative hope for the future.
Damascus, considered the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, was once known as the "pearl of the East".
But before they can rebuild, Syrians must pick through the wreckage of what the Assads' administration wrought, revealing the true extent of its repression and brutality.
The ABC ventured into the heart of Syria days after the fall of the regime, finding a traumatised nation reckoning with the secrets of the despotic family that terrorised them for far too long.
Assad enriched himself — but made one huge mistake
The Tishreen Palace, the former home of the Assad family, is damaged and abandoned.
The building sits above the Syrian capital, Damascus, and was the official residence of the ruling family until they moved to a new, grander building even higher up the mountain in the 1990s.
The ballroom was once the scene of Assad parties and opulent gatherings.
Now it has been burned.
Chandeliers lie melted on the floor.
The decorative ceiling is now ashes.
Bedrooms and offices have been ransacked and ornate Syrian furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, broken.
The furniture is old, some wrapped in plastic.
The televisions, archaic Syrionic TV sets from the 1980 or 90s, have been completely ignored by the looters.
The building symbolises the Assad regime to some extent: Grandiose on the outside, but neglected within.
While the Assad family enriched themselves by hollowing out the country's remaining assets and producing a party drug called captagon on an industrial scale, they made a fatal error.
They didn't look after the soldiers charged with their protection.
It was apparent from the swift collapse of regime forces as the rebels advanced that Syria's government was already crumbling.
Soldiers were reportedly poorly paid and poorly fed.
Their hastily abandoned uniforms, boots and equipment lie on the roads beside their former posts.
No-one seems to be touching these symbols of the hated regime.
We see abandoned army bases filled with outdated, neglected vehicles.
The police posts and checkpoints that were part of Syria's network of repression are roughly, cheaply built, sometimes using sticks and rocks or old barrels and tyres.
Regime tanks, very old Soviet models, sit damaged and abandoned on the roadsides.
Tanks like these, as well as "barrel bombs" of high explosives, were used to bombard the city of Darayya, south of Damascus, after it became a base for the Syrian opposition.
While the massacre of Darayya happened 12 years ago, we found evidence of this horror everywhere.
Life returns to Assad's ghost cities
Darayya was initially famous for holding peaceful anti-government protests but later became known as one of the worst-affected areas in the civil war.
First came the Darayya Massacre in 2012, one of the seminal events of the conflict, in which pro-government forces, including Iran-backed militias like Hezbollah, were accused of going from house to house and killing hundreds of people.
Then followed four years of intense bombardment until an agreement was reached to let anti-regime rebels and their families leave.
Whole sections of the city were flattened and remained in ruins.
An entire street of multi-storey apartment buildings has been gutted, with a few families living amongst the wreckage.
Housam Makiya was working in a photo shop when the war began in 2011.
"When the revolution started, each person chose their way. My mission was to document my city through images and to convey this vision to the world," he said.
Housam was one of those who went to the northern province of Idlib, which was still held by rebels, when the government regained control in 2016.
"We had to hide from the regime as we knew that it would target us directly. It would spare no-one," he said.
"Darayya was besieged. They attacked the city with all the weapons. It is almost a miracle that young men from Darayya have been able to survive this massacre."
Now, with Assad's regime gone, he has returned with his wife and daughters to his family home.
"It is hard to describe my feelings. I don't have words to tell you how I felt when I entered the house and saw my mother after eight years. My life stopped. I felt like I was reborn," he said.
He is shocked that so much damage remains.
"I had imagined that after we had left, the regime would have rebuilt the city," he said.
"I saw Darayya destroyed during the siege. After I had left, I thought life would have returned, infrastructure would have been fixed. When I came back, I found none of all that. It was just identical to the Darayya I had left."
It is a similar story in the city of Ghouta, which was bombarded with chemical weapons in 2013.
"We were sleeping when suddenly people were shouting 'chemical'! It was chaotic. No-one knew what the treatment was," Maher Bakkoura, who lived close to the impact sites, told the ABC.
Multiple international investigations determined rockets filled with deadly Sarin gas were dropped on this part of Ghouta, as well as conventional explosives, killing hundreds of people.
Poorly resourced local hospitals struggled to treat those affected, as staff did not know what chemical had been used.
Sarin is one of the most toxic poisons ever made, with even a small dose enough to make people seriously ill.
A powerful nerve agent, it shuts down muscle control, making people convulse, pass out and die.
Medics responding to the attack said victims were foaming at the mouth and had turned blue from suffocation.
"We had hospitals operating with basic material. Children and women died at home," Mr Bakkoura said.
"A great number of medics who came to rescue people died as well. Nobody really knew what to do.
"The strangest thing was that the people who were brought to the hospital were not treated, as the small number of doctors available at the time had no clue about how to treat people."
Mohammad, another resident, said his family suffered greatly in the bombardment.
"In these three buildings that were hit, around 75 people died. Around 39, 40 people are all my relatives. Others are long-time neighbours and friends," he said.
One of the rockets remains in an apartment, the hole it punched through the ceiling not yet repaired.
Those responsible for the Ghouta and Daraya attacks have not yet been held to account, but residents are pleased they are no longer in power.
"We are happy because all this blood was not wasted," Mohammad said.
"The blood of the martyrs, the innocent people, women and children who were unarmed at home and were targeted with these chemical weapons."
Inside the most feared place in Syria
Syrians are still finding out just how many people were killed by the regime.
The government's structure of overlapping security services, hidden detention facilities, opaque processes and extortionist practices left many families not knowing what had been done to relatives who were arrested.
In Sednaya, the military prison known as the "human slaughterhouse," desperate crowds searched the facility for traces of their family members, combing through documents spread across the floor, benches and tables.
"I am searching for any information about my brother, to find his name in the records," Yasser Ahmad Lijani told the ABC
"What is this inhuman behaviour to throw people in prison and leave them, without any accountability?"
Lawyer Ammar Abarra was detained in Sednaya's "red section" for five days in 2017.
He is now gathering documents, trying to catalogue who was kept in the prison and what happened to them.
"I am collecting evidence. A lot of people have disappeared, and their families know nothing about their fate. Maybe someone was in Sednaya and he was killed or freed," he said.
Human rights groups estimate thousands of people were either executed or died from the torture and neglect at Sednaya, one of at least 87 detention and torture facilities operated by the Syrian regime, according to the United Nations.
"Sednaya Military Prison is where the Syrian state quietly slaughters its own people," Amnesty International found.
"The victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government."
Doctor Yaman al Hussein, who was among those visiting the prison, said Sednaya was one of the most feared places in Syria, whispered about by people who survived it or their friends and relatives.
"Somebody told somebody, who told somebody [else], like a story, like parts of a puzzle," he said.
That was part of the strategy, to make Syrians afraid to even voice any criticism of the regime, lest they be denounced and disappear into the system.
Inside the prison kitchen, groups of men worked.
Some used metal bars, others had a jackhammer
All were trying to break open the concrete floors.
They were looking for secret cells rumoured to be hidden beneath the prison.
Others dug with picks and shovels in the prison grounds.
A former prisoner told them a hidden section existed underground.
"[The prisoners] are all under the sand … they are suffocating. Generators used to bring them fresh air," said Ahmad, who was searching for his father.
But those digging only found rocks and dirt.
Experienced rescue teams had already declared the prison was clear and there were no hidden chambers, but desperate families searched on.
Relatives waited around the grounds, sleeping on mattresses and blankets next to fires.
Khadija Mohamad Agha had come from the city of Homs to search for her son Mohammad, who was detained in 2016.
"I visited him for the first year and a half and then I would come and they would tell me he wasn't here anymore," she said.
"I would ask them, 'where is he, is he alive or dead?' They wouldn't tell me.
"He was a street vendor selling fava beans, but because of all the torture, he admitted many things.
"I hope that God punishes this regime and I hope God does not forgive them. I hope God does with them what they did to our children."
Many people hope that their family members have been released and are yet to contact them.
"Yesterday I saw on social media my brother getting out, but we don't know where he went," one man said, showing a video.
"I saw him on Facebook, and I came here to check what the source of this video is. I don't know where he is. I had no news from him for eight years."
Many relatives said they were victims of extortion, unable to pay off Assad regime officials to keep their loved ones out of prison.
Umm Ahmad Samo has brought photos of her son to the prison in the hope someone will recognise him.
"He used to demonstrate. The first time they detained him for 15 days and he was released. He was caught another time and he spent 17 days in prison and was released," she said.
"There was a guy, a bad person, who was in charge of a political bureau in our neighbourhood and he passed by our house and saw Ahmad sitting outside.
"He said to him 'tell your father you won't get out of prison unless you pay 100,000 pounds.'"
What now for Syria?
The Syrian regime's repression and crimes against its own people have been documented for decades — from the retributive bombardment of civilians in the city of Hama in 1982, to the chemical weapons attacks in Ghouta.
Yet this year many governments, including in the European Union, were preparing to welcome Assad back into the diplomatic fold, accepting his repression in the name of "stability" and also so the millions of Syrian refugees displaced by the conflict could be pushed back home.
There are many concerns now about what the dominant rebel faction, the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), will do with its new-found power.
HTS is a listed terrorist organisation in Australia, the US and the UK because of its prior links to the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
It has promised to set up an inclusive government that protects the rights of ethnic and religious minorities and has won praise from Syrians so far for prioritising stability and service provision.
"There is literally nothing worse than what [Assad did]. What [HTS] are doing so far is so great," Izzam Barake, a demonstrator on the street in Damascus, told the ABC.
"They are making it free.
"Now we are finally free, now there is hope."
- Reporting:
- Production: Chérine Yazbeck
- Photography: Haidarr Jones and Chérine Yazbeck
- Editing: and
