The New Yorker:

Images taken just after the precipitous end of the civil war reveal a secret legacy that is just becoming visible.

By Jon Lee Anderson
Photography by Moises Saman

Two days after the Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad fled his palace, Moises Saman and I arrived in Damascus to witness the beginning of a profound reckoning. The Assad family had dominated the country for half a century, culminating in a dozen years of civil war. Now a long campaign of internal violence had suddenly given way to an edgy, surreal peace, as Syrians took stock of the conflict that had dominated their lives for so long. Around Damascus, entire neighborhoods lay razed and depopulated, and much of the city center looked dingy and worn. In the suburbs, bombing campaigns had stripped residential buildings of everything that once made them homes.

Along with the physical evidence of violence, there was a less obvious register of human loss—a phenomenon that Moises observes with singular sensitivity and skill. In the past two decades, he and I have reported together on a series of conflicts. After the collapse of the dictatorships in Iraq and in Libya, we found abundant proof of their brutality. But Assad seems to have been distinctly vicious. In 2012, as Syria descended into violence, Moises and I travelled to Aleppo with a crew of insurgent rebels and caught an early glimpse of the war’s horrors. At the time, we were appalled to learn that some twenty thousand Syrians had died. Twelve years later, estimates of the dead range as high as six hundred and twenty thousand; another fourteen million people, more than half the country’s citizens, have been displaced from their homes.

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