Join us
The Media Today

The Fall of the House of Assad

What next for Syria and its press?
December 10, 2024 By Jon Allsop
Pedestrians casually walk over an image of former Syrian President Bashar Assad on a sidewalk in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

In March, he gave a rare interview in which he predicted that Donald Trump would win reelection in the US in the fall and insisted that, in global politics, past is inevitably prologue: “Everything that happens in the present is a result of history.” A few weeks later, he was invited to a regional summit. In May, he said that his wife had been diagnosed with leukemia, forcing her to step back from her duties. The same month, he visited Iran; in July, he visited Russia; in between times, it was suggested that he could, just maybe, visit Turkey, though not France, which upheld an arrest warrant that it had issued against him for complicity in chemical attacks against his own people. In the run-up to the US election, one candidate was forced to deny ever having supported him; in the aftermath, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence was accused of the same (and worse besides). A few weeks ago, The New Yorker reported on how his country had become “the Middle East’s drug dealer,” a reference to the trade of the amphetamine captagon. Throughout this period, analysts for international publications declared his “normalization”—in his region, but also among certain European governments—a “disaster,” and “dangerous.” Another assessed that he had emerged “militarily victorious” from his country’s civil war, but warned that the war, “though winding down, could still flare back up and escalate.” The Financial Times accused him of watching his country burn. “He may still get his way. Or else he could lose everything.”

If Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, did make headlines in international news outlets this year, it’s safe to say that he was rarely on their front page. But that has now changed, and with astonishing speed. In the last days of November, Syrian rebel forces began advancing toward the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, in an offensive that the FT described at the time as “unexpected.” They successfully took it—then Hama, and then Homs, while rebels in the south took Daraa. Finally, over the weekend, they took Damascus, the capital. Videos circulating online showed people inside Assad’s deserted palace, freeing people from his prisons, and taking over the state TV building, where a man eventually appeared to host a news bulletin, seated behind an anchor’s desk. “To those who bet on us and those who didn’t, to those who thought one day that we were broken, we announce to you from the Syrian News Channel the victory of the great Syrian revolution after thirteen years of patience and sacrifice,” he said on air. “We won the bet and toppled the criminal Assad regime.”

The rebels hadn’t just ended the thirteen years of fighting that followed the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, nor one regime in isolation, but a half-century-old dynasty that began in the early seventies, when Assad’s father, Hafez, seized power. “For fifty-four years, generations of Syrians lived and died in a country that was colloquially known as Assad’s Syria,” Rania Abouzeid wrote in The New Yorker over the weekend—“a place where children were taught that the walls had ears and that a misplaced word could lead to being disappeared,” and where images of the leader were everywhere. Unsurprisingly, press freedom did not flourish in such a climate. There was a brief moment of hope in the early 2000s, when Hafez died and his son succeeded him: the latter told state media that it didn’t need to put his photo on the front page every day, freed certain prisoners of conscience, allowed more room for political debate, and permitted some non-state news to be published, including a satirical weekly. But this opening closed. “State newspapers reverted to their old leaden style,” and the regime made it clear that “the margins of acceptable discourse are strictly limited,” the Committee to Protect Journalists noted. By 2010, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Syria as the sixth-worst country in the world for press freedom.

This repressive climate did not stop some Western journalists from fawning over Assad. (Even as the Arab Spring was rising, in February 2011, Vogue famously ran a profile depicting his wife, Asma, as a “rose in the desert”; the article was later scrubbed from the internet.) As Assad’s violence against his own people intensified, the fawning became increasingly untenable (though, sadly, some Western journalists and politicians continued to do it, or at least apologize for him). The ensuing civil war was a disaster for press freedom. In November 2011, CPJ registered the first killing of a journalist at work in the country since it began keeping track in 1992: Ferzat Jarban, a cameraman covering anti-regime protests in Homs province, was arrested, then found dead in the road, his body mutilated. According to RSF, eight journalists had been killed by the end of 2011, making Syria one of the deadliest openings to a war for the press this century. Early in 2012, the first foreign reporter died while covering the conflict; others would follow, including the Americans Marie Colvin—who was killed by a shell in February 2012, in what a US court would later deem a targeted regime attack—and James Foley and Steven Sotloff, who were beheaded by ISIS militants in 2014. In all, according to CPJ, a hundred and forty-one journalists have been killed in Syria since the war began. The most recent death came just last week, when regime strikes on rebels near Hama killed Anas Alkharboutli, a photojournalist working for the German news agency DPA. A witness said that he appeared to be targeted after taking pictures of a military plane.

Since Damascus was liberated, a sort of press freedom has flowered in the vacuum. The BBC’s Lina Sinjab, who is Syrian, said that for the first time, she had been able to enter her country without fearing arrest. CNN’s Clarissa Ward similarly noted the lack of challenge as she zipped through an abandoned border crossing; she has since reported from Damascus, including inside a notorious prison where families have been working frantically to flee trapped loved ones. Speaking with Ward’s colleague Christiane Amanpour, Rami Jarrah, who documented regime atrocities as a citizen journalist and now lives in self-imposed exile in Berlin, said that footage of prisons being emptied had moved him to tears. “It was exhilarating—I haven’t cried so much in so long, like a baby,” he said. “We’ve been given our country back. We have the opportunity now to build
a country that represents all of Syria, something that just under two weeks ago was literally impossible.” “For the first time in twelve years,” Semafor’s Sarah Dadouch wrote on X, “I can truthfully say ‘I am going home.’”

There is fresh hope, too, that one journalist in particular might finally be able to go home, in the opposite direction: Austin Tice, a contributor to the Washington Post and McClatchy, among other outlets, who went missing while covering the war in 2012; since then, he has only been seen once, in a social media video that showed him in captivity soon afterward, but his family and supporters in the US press have never given up on him, despite what they have characterized as at best fitful official efforts to secure his release. On Friday, as the rebels continued to make progress, Tice’s mother, Debra, told a news conference that a “significant source” had relayed intelligence that he is still alive; on Sunday, President Biden spoke at the White House and said “we think we can get him back.” Roger Carstens, a US official focused on hostages, is reportedly now in the Middle East to coordinate the search.

Still, in his remarks, Biden also stressed that the US has not yet seen “direct evidence” that Tice is alive. For now, his is a case of wait and see—and hope. Similar can be said for the overall political picture in Syria, and for the hopes of a durable free press in the country. The rebel offensive that finally toppled Assad was led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and his group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a onetime affiliate of Al Qaeda that the US still classes as a terrorist group; Jolani has insisted—including in a rare interview last week with CNN—that he has changed, and that he has pluralist intentions, but actions will speak louder than words, and on the free speech front, his group has cracked down on dissent in the past. Writing for the Boston Globe yesterday, Lina Chawaf, an exiled Syrian journalist, noted her “very mixed feelings”: while covering the war, she wrote, she learned that “the men who carry the weapons on either side have not shown a commitment to freedom or democracy.” Speaking with Amanpour, Jarrah said that, for all the emotion of this moment, it’s still hard to know what to make of it. Less than two weeks ago, Syria “was a distant memory: it was a subject that I wanted to avoid,” Jarrah said. Now “maybe Syrians generally are traumatized, and can’t just accept that this actually looks like it’s headed in the right direction.”

Sign up for CJR’s daily email

Whatever happens next—for the Syrian people and their press—it’s already clear that Assad wound up losing everything. Well, not quite everything: following the liberation of Damascus, Russia’s state media—the same organism, incidentally, that had interviewed Assad back in March—said that Assad was in Moscow, and would be granted asylum there by his ally Vladimir Putin. Everything that happens in the present is a result of history.


Other notable stories:

  • In yesterday’s newsletter, we noted reports that Matea Gold, a senior editor at the Washington Post, was set to move to the New York Times after being passed over for the top job in the Post’s newsroom. Yesterday, the move was confirmed; editors at the Post green-lighted a story on it, but, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, Matt Murray, the interim executive editor (and a reported candidate for the full-time role himself), vetoed the article, arguing that the Post should not cover itself (even though it has done so extensively in the past). As Folkenflik notes, Gold’s is the latest in “a series of significant departures from the paper,” where morale is reportedly low at present.
  • The Wall Street Journal’s Santiago PĂ©rez and JosĂ© de CĂłrdoba profiled Alfonso de Angoitia and Bernardo GĂłmez, a pair of Mexican media executives who helped take telenovelas global before assuming senior roles at the merged TelevisaUnivision group, and who now stand to serve as “important interlocutors” between Mexico and the incoming Trump administration. Univision has traditionally been perceived as liberal-leaning, but the network has tacked away from that of late. Per the Journal, Trump recently met de Angoitia and GĂłmez and thanked them for their coverage. 
  • And Ryan Haas, of Oregon Public Broadcasting, reports on how the Ashland Daily Tidings, a long-standing local newspaper that shut down last year, has lived on—as a scammy website that seemingly uses artificial intelligence to generate fake news stories under bylines that, in some cases, have been stolen from real journalists elsewhere. (Two of the Tidings’ “journalists” actually work for the Mail in London.) The goal, Haas reports, “is apparently to deceive Oregonians into giving clicks—and the resulting ad revenue—to whoever is behind the website.” 

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.