There is a town called Busra al-Sham in southern Syria near the Jordanian border. It is part of the Daraa Governorate that runs along the Jordanian border.
During the years of the Syrian civil war, it was a key center for Syrian rebels. Although Busra al-Sham fell to Bashar al-Assad in 2018, it never lost its sense of being in opposition to the regime. When the regime began to teeter in December 2024, the people rose again to help strike a blow against Damascus.
A year after Assad’s downfall, there are many questions about the future of Syria. For the people of Busra al-Sham and many other areas in Syria, there is no going back. They want a future of hope. To showcase this, the town held a ceremony in its almost perfectly preserved Roman amphitheater.
According to a video on the site, a well-known historic landmark, major festivities took place there to mark the one-year anniversary of the fall of Assad’s regime. These festivities joined those in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama. These are the Syrian cities that are home to historic population centers.
Conquer history
It is worth recalling that Syria is a historic region in the Middle East. It has not always been a country, but it has always been important in the area. Cities such as Damascus have been centers of the Arab and Islamic world for more than 1,000 years.
Before that, they were also crucial in other regimes and times. For instance, the western part of the country – the cities – was conquered by Rome in 64 b.c from the Seleucids. Nevertheless, part of Syria remained independent, especially the desert city of Palmyra. It stood at a crossroads between Rome and Parthia for years. The ruins of Palmyra are still impressive, even though ISIS destroyed some of them.
The destruction wrought by ISIS is a reminder of the scars of the country from the terrible long war that lasted from 2011 to 2024. When the Assad regime fell a year ago, it fell along the lines of those historic cities, as its forces fled Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and then melted away in Damascus.
Assad, the dictator, fled to Moscow. He would have passed images of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had run the Ba’athist regime from the 1970s to 2000. With the rise and fall of the two Assads, 50 years of Syrian history passed.
Now Syria is in a new era. Those cities, from Aleppo to Damascus, are celebrating. In Damascus, the new President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and government ministers attended a military parade on Monday, organized by the Defense Ministry on Mezzeh Highway, to celebrate Liberation Day, SANA state media reported.
“Syrians gathered at Umayyad Square in central Damascus to mark the first anniversary of liberation from the former regime,” the report said.
Sharaa went to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and spoke about the “dawn of the liberation of Syria.” He wore a military uniform for the first time in a year to commemorate the takeover of Damascus on December 8, 2024. At the time, he was the leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a Syrian rebel group that had controlled Idlib. In his past, he was also linked to al-Qaeda, and he has spent the year trying to show that his extremist past is now changed.
However, not everywhere in Syria is celebrating in the same way, illustrating the divisions in the country.
Eastern Syria, run by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which is mostly Kurdish-led, has not been celebrating. The SDF and the civilian authorities of what is called the AANES have apparently banned events under the guise of security. They claim that terror threats make large gatherings impossible.
Yet, some suspect the real reason is that they are concerned that they rule over large areas of eastern Syria that Sunni Arabs and Arab tribes populate, and that those people would like to celebrate and turn the celebration into a challenge to the SDF.
The SDF is a key US partner, and it defeated ISIS in Syria in 2019. However, the group’s civilian leadership is deeply rooted in Left-leaning Kurdish politics and tends toward authoritarianism.
There is no multi-party democracy in eastern Syria; even Kurdish opposition groups, such as the Kurdish National Council, have not been permitted to play a role. Hope for change since last year has not led to significant shifts.
SDF leader Mazloum Abdi recently traveled to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where he met with local leadership. The KRG leaders are from the centrist Kurdistan Democratic Party. But the meetings have not changed the governance of eastern Syria. That said, they have helped improve Kurdish coordination on other issues.
The SDF stated on Monday that the fall of Assad’s regime was imminent. According to eastern Syria’s North Press agency, “The SDF said that the fall of the Assad regime offers Syrians a ‘historic opportunity’ to rebuild their country on new foundations, calling for an inclusive national dialogue and warning against attempts to revive the old authoritarian mindset.”
The group also said the end of Ba’athist rule represents more than a political change, describing it as the downfall of a system built on “power monopoly and denial of the people’s will,” the report noted.
Abdi wrote, “A year ago, Syria entered a new phase with the fall of the former regime, a pivotal moment we take pride in, which ended decades of tyranny and division.”
Celebrations for the fall of the Assad regime don’t appear to have taken place in Sweida either. This is the Druze area in Syria that Israel has vowed to defend against the new government. The Druze had a complex relationship with the previous regime. Many men were called up to serve in the army, and some reached high ranks, as in the Israeli and Lebanese militaries.
However, they chafed under the authoritarianism at times. They also feared the Islamist groups among the Syrian rebels. When the regime fell, there were clashes between Arabs and Druze. This led to the current state of affairs in which Sweida is effectively its own autonomous area and does not answer to Damascus.
There is little media coverage in Sweida, so reports are unclear about what is happening there. However, there is not much celebrating. Suwayda24, a news channel, wrote on X/Twitter, “To our Syrian brothers and sisters across every corner of the homeland... We write to you on behalf of many of the people of [Sweida]; we write to you today with hearts filled with both joy and pain.”
“Joy at the downfall of the defunct regime that brought us all suffering for decades, and its collapse, which has opened the doors of hope for a free and united Syria where all Syrians live as equals in rights and duties. We want to share in the celebrations of this historic victory, which was the fruit of all our sacrifices, from north to south, and from east to west,” Suwayda24 wrote.
It added that the area is “gripped by the intense pain of what happened to us in July past. Painful security events that witnessed random killings, forced displacement of thousands of families, and the burning of homes and properties... and widespread looting.”
“These events, which claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians from our sons and daughters, and included sectarian violence and grave violations, came at a time when we were dreaming of peace and stability after years of tyranny.”