For this photographer, the fall of Assad means a rediscovery of his home country

Alaa Hassan gripped the worn steering wheel of his 2008 sky blue Fiat Punto, which had kind of become his second home.

“You know, I call it Fifi, right?” he asked as he watched for traffic on the congested Damascus road.

Since he returned to Syria, a week after the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad, Fifi has been Hassan’s window to the country — a way to rediscover places he once knew intimately.

Hassan is working on a photography project to capture life amid the destruction left by the Syrian civil war. His goal is to document this moment of transition in the country for future generations.

“It’s not about today or tomorrow, it’s about how people will remember our history,” he said.

Hassan drove around, sometimes taking pictures from inside his car when he didn’t want to draw too much attention.

He grew up in the capital, Damascus. His family was impacted by Assad’s brutality even before the war broke out. In the 1980s, his father was detained for his Leftist political views, and Hassan said his entire childhood was spent visiting him at the notorious Sednaya prison, the place where people went to disappear.

In 2011, when the uprisings began, Hassan was in his 20s. He was young, he admitted, but he was not naïve.

“We all knew there was potential to get detained, to get shot or whatever, and we knew the risks we were taking,” he said, but added, “we had nothing to lose, to be honest. We had no future.”

Hassan took part in protests and helped smuggle food and medicine into areas besieged by government forces.

“It was a revolution for real. It was like what they write about in books. You actually feel on top of the world. You feel that you’re right all the time and that you’re standing up for what’s right.”

But what started as a simple protest, quickly turned deadly and violent.

One by one, Hassan’s friends were killed or disappeared by the security forces.

His sister’s fiancé, Rami, disappeared in 2013, he said. They still don’t know what happened to him.

It was clear to Hassan that he could no longer stay in Syria.

In 2013, he left the country. He married his American girlfriend in Turkey, and they headed to New York.

But his heart never left the streets of Damascus and its surrounding areas.

“I lost all my [photo subjects]. So, I couldn’t take pictures of anything meaningful [to] me,” he recalled.

Before he left, Hassan was photographing “the troubled suburbs of Damascus,” as he called them — impoverished areas that became the front lines of the war.

“The people from the slums, surprise, surprise, they actually wanted to change the government because they didn’t have good lives,” Hassan explained.

In New York, he felt guilty for having survived the war, he said, and for being able to leave the country when so many others couldn’t.

In 2019, he felt like the revolution had failed. That Syrians would have to be forever envious of the Tunisians who had managed to oust their dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Meanwhile, it seemed like the world had forgotten about all of Assad’s atrocities. The Syrian leader was being reintegrated into the international community. He was meeting with heads of state and traveling around the region.

“I had to accept the new reality of the country — that we’re no longer this well-educated, middle-class dominated country. We’re actually one of the most devastated countries with high poverty rates and not very high literacy rates,” Hassan said.

But what Hassan and so many others didn’t know at the time was that, in about five years, Assad’s empire would crumble, and that none of his powerful allies — Iran and Russia — would be able to stop his downfall.

On Dec. 8, 2024, that is exactly what happened.

“We were feeling the enjoyment of the humiliation of the person that humiliated us for our entire lives,” Hassan recalled of watching Assad flee the country and his private mansions being ransacked.

The first thing Hassan noticed when he returned to Syria was how tired people looked.

“Exhaustion. They had a look of exhaustion on their faces,” he said.

Years of war, oppression and sanctions had left its toll. The city smelled of gasoline and diesel, he said, and it looked like a ghost of its former self.

As Hassan adjusted to his new life in Syria, he asked himself a question: “What is my duty now? What’s my responsibility?”

He found his answer in a photography project.

Remembering as a form of resistance

The sun cast a golden light on the crumbling buildings. Hassan stood amid rows upon rows of destroyed buildings in Jobar, just outside of Damascus.

What used to be apartment blocks, schools and playgrounds were piles of rubble. It was eerily quiet.

As Hassan snapped his pictures, gunfire rang out in the distance. He wondered if it was related to the sectarian tensions which had been brewing recently, or perhaps some bored men just shooting for fun.

He carried on, looking for signs of life amid the rubble. Trees, shrubs, the odd stray dog.

And then, suddenly, he noticed some birds.

“It’s sparrow season,” he remembered. “It’s like hunting, no?” he asked as he maneuvered his camera.

“Yeah, I got it! I got a good one!” he said triumphantly as he snapped an image.

Driving around, taking photos and speaking with people, for Hassan this is a form of resistance — resistance against forgetting.

“It’s important for everyone to remember what had happened,” he said. “And what we are able to do to each other, what we are capable of doing and how much destruction it took until one person gave up power. We have to remember this very well so it doesn’t happen again.”

As a part of his own resistance, Hassan hopes to publish a photo book of all his images once his project is complete.

Producer Zein Khuzam assisted in reporting this story.