Revenge and Unease Shadow Effort to Restore Order

Across Aleppo on Wednesday there was celebration as exiled residents returned home more than a week after Syrian rebels captured the city in a lightning-fast offensive that ended with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.

They came back to their city from across the border with Turkey or from elsewhere — somewhere safer — if not permanently, then at least to assess what remained and where they might live. They set out to visit old neighborhoods and homes, some of which no longer existed.

Amar Sabir, 23, fled the city nearly 10 years ago with her family and ended up in Turkey. There, she got married and had two children, but never gave up hope of returning to Aleppo. On Sunday, she did.

“God willing, we’ll never have to leave Syria again,” she said, standing with her back to the horse statue.

Her cousins were taking her around the city to reacquaint her with the landmarks and historical sites. “This is going to become a historic place,” she said.

“This is where they brought down the regime,” said her husband, Basil al-Hassan.

Their first stop had been to the 13th-century citadel, a towering medieval structure rising above the city. Once a fortress, the landmark is the most famous structure in all of Aleppo, and one of the most enduring in the city. There, little boys hawked Syrian flags to people eager to pose with it. At the gated entrance of the citadel, a popcorn seller played a protest song on repeat, the chorus a reproach to the ousted Assad regime: “He who kills his people is a traitor.”

The song was mostly drowned out by a nearby drum circle, which paused its celebration briefly only during the call to prayer. Several men pounded their drums as others jumped and danced, twirling like whirling dervishes.

Ali Siraaj Ali, 44, had also fled Aleppo during the war. Wednesday was his first day back. He, too, went to the citadel first, bringing his son. “God willing, we’ll be happy,” the father said, after dancing excitedly, catching his breath. “But it’s unknown.”

Though excitement and frenzy were on full display in some parts of Aleppo, the city was still gripped by uncertainty and grim reminders of the 13-year civil war.

Farther down the street from the damaged equestrian statue were the remnants of one of Mr. al-Assad’s last acts of violence: a small crater where a rocket tore through a crowd on Nov. 30, killing about 15 people and wounding dozens more. Dried blood stained the sidewalk. But most visitors didn’t seem to notice.

In the Salahuldeen neighborhood, where the first battles between antigovernment rebels and Assad forces were fought beginning in 2012, Zuhair Khateeb felt uneasy.

Standing next to his small mechanics shop, Mr. Khateeb tore pita bread into small pieces and threw them to about 10 pet pigeons at his feet. The clinking of tiny bracelets around the birds’ legs provided a whimsical soundtrack to a grim discussion.

All around Mr. Khateeb, 43, were piles of rubble, what remained of the homes and buildings that had been destroyed by Syrian airstrikes years ago. Other buildings in the neighborhood appeared to be torn in half. The government never came to clear any of it away or to rebuild.

Residents, Mr. Khateeb said, were not allowed to. “No one did anything here,” he said. “This was a slow death. They wanted to kill us slowly, and we couldn’t say anything.”

He worked day and night to save up money to send his eldest son to Dubai so the teenager could avoid mandatory military service under the Syrian government.

In the weeks before the surprise rebel offensive started last month, the military began combing Aleppo’s neighborhoods, sweeping up large groups of men in their 30s and 40s, he said. Now that the regime is gone, he hopes his son can return home from Dubai.

Others are coming back to the neighborhood even though they don’t have anywhere to live, he said. “Based on what people are saying, God willing, there is something better to come,” added Mr. Khateeb. “But we’ve seen and suffered a lot already.”

At a park called President’s Square, another toppled monument lay face down on the ground. What used to represent the head of Hafez al-Assad, Mr. al-Assad’s father and a former president, was barely recognizable, a piece of shattered stone attached to shoulders by a few twisted rods of rebar.

Abdulhadi Ghazal, 17, sat on the pedestal that once held the now-desecrated bust, posing like Rodin’s “Thinker.” Someone had graffitied the words “11/30 the square of the free” on the pedestal.

“I was sitting where the leader was; I wanted to sit in his place,” said the teenager, a smattering of a mustache across his upper lip. But when a few people started taking his picture, he jumped off, fearful of what might happen to him if he were seen disrespecting a regime that still inspires fear in Syria.

“We saw so many people in prison, we got scared,” he said, referring to the images of emaciated and tortured prisoners that have emerged in recent days. “We’re scared the president might return.”

He wasn’t in the square when the bust was destroyed, but after he saw a video of it online, he said, he wanted to come and see it for himself — and to stand where the statue once stood.

Others simply spat at it.

At City Hall across the street, officials with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other rebel groups that helped take down the Assad family are scrambling to form a government that will oversee the cities and towns they now control.

A large photo of Mr. al-Assad still hangs, untouched, outside the building. No one has gotten around to removing it yet.

Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.

But in recent days, as rebels elsewhere in the country toppled the Assad regime, plunging the country into a new and precarious position, the Kurds, who control northeastern Syria, have come under assault by militant groups backed by Turkey, a longtime adversary. In clashes in Manbij and Kobani their forces have been attacked by fighters aided by Turkish drones and air power.

As the fighting has intensified between the Kurds and Turkey-backed groups, the main Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, said it had to divert fighters from defending the prisons that house accused ISIS members to positions on the front lines.

“This leaves a vacuum behind that can be taken advantage by ISIS and other actors,” the S.D.F.’s top general, known by the nom de guerre Mazlum Kobani, said early on Wednesday.

Over 9,000 ISIS fighters are housed in over 20 S.D.F. facilities throughout Syria, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, chief of the U.S. military’s Central Command, said in a statement in September.

General Kobani said Washington’s failure to stop Turkey and its proxies from attacking the Kurds had endangered the peace U.S. forces had fought to establish.

“We and the Americans liberated this city together,” Gen. Kobani said of Manbij. The battles there against ISIS, he added, cost “lots of souls and lives.” But when the Turkish-backed rebel groups began their assault on Kurdish forces there last week, he said, “there was no firm position from the U.S. side” to offer help.

The Kurds have been instrumental partners for the United States in fighting ISIS, an Islamist terrorist group bent on establishing a global caliphate, for more than a decade. But Turkey views armed Kurds so close to its border as a threat. For decades Turkey has fought Kurdish separatists, who seek to carve out an independent country.

America’s divided allegiances between their Turkish and Kurdish allies have been expressed in recent comments by U.S. officials.

The U.S. has an interest in defeating ISIS, John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, said at a news briefing on Tuesday, and “that means partnering with the Syrian Democratic Forces.”

But he added, “the Turks have a legitimate counterterrorism threat,” for which they “have a right to defend their citizens in their territory against terrorist attacks.”

When those goals overlap or conflict, Mr. Kirby said, the United States and Turkey would discuss “how both those outcomes can be achieved.”

The Department of Defense on Wednesday did not immediately comment on Gen. Kobani’s suggestion that the U.S. was abandoning its Kurdish allies. On Tuesday, ahead of a U.S.-brokered truce in the city of Kobani, General Kurilla visited American and Kurdish forces in Syria and met with Gen. Kobani.

Gen. Kobani said that no U.S. troops had been involved in the recent fighting and that U.S. military support was limited to some drone observation and acting as intermediaries between the S.D.F. and other groups, to ensure the evacuation of civilians from areas with fighting.

On Wednesday, SDF, said it had agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire in the city of Manbij, which included that the group’s forces would be withdrawn. According to a war monitoring group, this withdrawal ends more than eight years of the group’s control of the city.

The United States did not immediately confirm its role.

“There is no American decision to protect the areas we liberated together from ISIS,” Gen. Kobani said in a translated interview. The expansion of fighting in northern Syria between armed Kurdish and Turkish-backed groups, has put the United States and Turkey — two NATO allies — at odds.

In 2019, President Trump withdrew U.S. forces from posts near the Turkish border, leaving the Kurds more vulnerable to attack, but about 900 American troops remain in Syria, working with the Kurds.

John Ismay and Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.

The satellite images captured on Tuesday show two of three frigates loitering several miles offshore. It is unclear whether the ships will stay in this location in the near future, or sail to another destination.

Since the deepwater port at Tartus was established in 1971, Moscow has maintained a nearly continuous presence there, first for the Soviet Union and then for Russia. It is Russia’s only such port in the Mediterranean.

Among the vessels still docked at Tartus are what appear to be several small Syrian naval ships, despite claims by Israel’s defense ministry that Israeli airstrikes had completely destroyed the Syrian Navy in the port city of Latakia on Tuesday.

No cargo ships have entered or departed from Tartus since at least Monday, according to ship tracking data from MarineTraffic, a commercial ship tracking agency. Two small commercial vessels arrived in the waters outside the port on Monday and Wednesday morning but have not yet docked at the port itself, according to MarineTraffic.

Other ships are shunning the port entirely. Two Russian vessels that regularly transport grain from Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine to Syria and appeared to be en route for another delivery to Tartus have altered course in recent days. The ships, including the Mikhail Nenashev, are currently circling off the coast of Cyprus.

An Iranian oil tanker, the Lotus, carrying 750,000 barrels of crude oil and destined for Syria, abruptly turned around in the Red Sea on Sunday morning, The Times reported earlier.

Syria under Mr. al-Assad was heavily dependent on oil from its ally Iran to sustain its refineries, according to Viktor Katona, head of oil analysis at Kpler, a company that monitors global trade.

“With Iranian tankers making a U-turn after Assad’s departure, transportation fuels would be a rarity in Syria as the country would most probably start running out of diesel and gasoline inventories quite soon,” Mr. Katona said.

The Biden administration has long prioritized finding Mr. Tice. But the sudden collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s reign in Syria has given new urgency to the efforts and intensified hope that U.S. officials can finally learn Mr. Tice’s fate.

A senior administration official said that the U.S. government was working to find Mr. Tice and bring him home, but the official added that the United States did not have “new verifiable information” on his location.

The case has frustrated U.S. intelligence officials. The Syrian government has never acknowledged holding Mr. Tice and has shunned opportunities to make a deal for his release.

U.S. officials said the Trump administration and the Biden administration had both worked hard on the case. Several years ago, the C.I.A. created what is known as a targeting cell overseen by the intelligence analyst who had supervised the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a sign of how important the issue is to the agency.

In more recent years there was a feeling, at least with some officials, that the case had grown cold. But that all changed in the last week. The fall of the Assad government has unlocked opportunities, current and former officials said.

The rebel groups who toppled the government have emptied Syria’s political prisons, releasing people who may have information about Mr. Tice and potentially giving access to records that could shed light. Former prisoners and members of Mr. al-Assad’s government may finally be able to talk.

But the high-ranking Syrians who U.S. officials have long suspected have information about Mr. Tice’s disappearance remain elusive. They include Ali Mamlouk, a former head of Syria’s National Security Bureau intelligence service; Kifah Moulhem, who succeeded Mr. Mamlouk; Maher al-Assad, Mr. al-Assad’s brother; and Bassam al-Hassan, a top general.

On Sunday, President Biden expressed optimism that Mr. Tice could be found and brought home.

“We believe he’s alive,” Mr. Biden said. “We think we can get him back but we have no direct evidence of that yet. And Assad should be held accountable.”

But in subsequent comments, White House officials tempered expectations. On Tuesday, John F. Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, said that the fall of the Assad government “could present an opportunity for us to glean more information about him, his whereabouts, his condition.”

Mr. Kirby said the administration was “pushing as hard as we can to learn as much as we can.”

“We want to see him home with his family where he belongs,” Mr. Kirby said.

Hours later, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, tried to walk a fine line between showing the administration’s work on Mr. Tice’s case without raising hopes further.

“We do not know his location and we do not know his condition, so we are trying to do everything we can do to get that information,” she said. “We are committed to bringing him home.”

The U.S. government’s stance has not shifted dramatically in the years since the C.I.A. targeting cell was created to find Mr. Tice. American officials have no concrete evidence that he is dead, so they continue to work under the assumption that he might be alive.

U.S. military officials said no hostage rescue mission was being prepared, or even planned, a sign that the view that Mr. Tice could be brought home is a minority view.

But U.S. officials said that the American military, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. were trying to work through partners and sources to learn more in the current chaos. Officials are trying to get hold of any Syrian government documents or other records that might indicate where Mr. Tice was held, when he was moved and what happened to him in captivity.

When Israel began bombing Syrian military installations, the United States asked Israeli officials to avoid striking prisons where Mr. Tice might have been held or that have information about his whereabouts.

Mr. Tice vanished as Syria descended into civil war, but soon appeared blindfolded in a video, surrounded by armed captors. The circumstances of his capture are murky, but U.S. officials have said the Syrian government ultimately took him into custody.

Investigators learned that he had been initially taken to a prison in Damascus and had been seen by a doctor, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the matter. Mr. Tice managed to escape for about a week but was recaptured, the people said.

Efforts to reach the doctor since Mr. al-Assad’s government crumbled have been unsuccessful.

What happened to Mr. Tice since then remains a mystery, but at some point U.S. intelligence obtained a Syrian document indicating that the Assad government had been holding Mr. Tice. Former U.S. officials described it as a type of judicial form, possibly showing a prisoner or arrest number.

Over the years, U.S. officials had sought to engage the Syrian government with little success. In 2017, Michael Pompeo, then C.IA. director, spoke with Mr. Mamlouk, the head of the National Security Bureau intelligence service, about Mr. Tice. Another top C.I.A. official traveled to Damascus and also raised the subject of Mr. Tice.

In the final months of the Trump administration, two senior U.S. officials went to Syria: Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and Kash Patel, whom Mr. Trump has named as his pick to be F.B.I. director.

During the Biden administration, Brett McGurk, the president’s Middle East coordinator, and other officials met twice with Imad Moustapha, a former Syrian ambassador.

In the meetings, the Syrians did not disclose anything about Mr. Tice.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

His call for retribution came as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an independent monitoring body, warned that armed groups had already launched retaliatory attacks on civilians in areas that were once considered loyal to the regime of Mr. al-Assad.

The Observatory did not lay out specific instances. But the claim, and further reports of groups of gunmen preparing to hunt down former commanders of Mr. al-Assad’s military forces, demonstrate the challenge of maintaining law and order amid a clamor for retribution after decades of violent repression, fear and poverty.

In the three days since the collapse of Mr. al-Assad’s government, the new leadership, which was pulled from the ranks of the Islamist militia that led his overthrow, has sought to project order and stability while assuring Syria’s diverse population that their rights and security will be protected.

While Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country, it has significant communities of Christians, Druse and others who adhere to different sects of Islam. Mr. al-Assad’s family and many of the regime’s top figures came from the minority Alawite sect.

Video circulating on social media on Tuesday and verified by The New York Times showed militants inside the mausoleum of the former Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad — the father of Bashar al-Assad — in the northwestern town of Al Qardaha. As one of the fighters steps on the tomb another can be heard saying: “This is in revenge for my killed cousins.”

The Syrian Observatory reported that armed groups dressed in military uniforms were looting property and intimidating locals in Latakia province, the heartland of the Alawite minority, prompting fears of further sectarian strife.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera published on Wednesday, Muhammad al-Bashir, Syria’s newly appointed caretaker prime minister, said that restoring “security and stability in all Syrian cities” was his transitional government’s first priority.

“People are exhausted by injustice and tyranny,” he said. “The authority of the state must be re-established to allow people to return to work and resume their normal lives.” But law and order require financing, he added, something he said the new government does not have.

“Our coffers are empty,” he said. “We are inheriting a bloated administration plagued by corruption.”

He said that the country had only Syrian pounds, “which are worth next to nothing,” and no foreign reserves. “So yes, financially, we are in a very bad state.”

The new rebel leadership announced a general amnesty for conscripted soldiers in the wake of Mr. al-Assad’s fall, but fears of a breakdown in security and increased retaliation against supporters of the former regime has pushed some to flee for neighboring Lebanon.

On Wednesday afternoon, Abdallah Fahed, 44, a former Syrian army soldier, lugged his small suitcase through the Masnaa border crossing with tears streaming down his cheeks. He said that he didn’t believe in the new leadership’s broadly publicized promises of amnesties and reconciliation.

“They will take revenge,” he said. “What they are doing behind the camera is taking army soldiers and killing them. I don’t feel safe going back.”

Euan Ward and Jacob Roubai contributed reporting from Lebanon.

Some of the key difficulties will be to “maintain security, maintain the stability of institutions, and ensure that the state does not disintegrate,” Mr. al-Bashir said in a statement reported by Syria’s state news agency SANA on Wednesday, adding that the interim administration had “extensive experience” of governing in Idlib.

Syria has been deeply divided by 13 years of civil war, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has vowed to maintain security and continuity, aiming to avoid the kind of power vacuum that has followed other Arab revolutions or regime changes. The group has tried to gain international legitimacy while also being criticized for its authoritarian tactics and supports a conservative and at times hard-line Sunni Islamist ideology.

Mr. al-Bashir was born in 1983 in Jabal al-Zawiya, Idlib province, according to a website of the rebel-led administration in Idlib. The area became infamous after security forces were accused by human rights groups and others of a series of killings in 2011 soon after protests erupted against Mr. al-Assad’s rule.

Mr. al-Bashir gained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Aleppo in 2007 and in subsequent years attained additional qualifications in English, administrative planning and project management, according to a website of the transitional government. In 2021, he also gained a degree in “Shariah and law” from Idlib University.

His political evolution, and how he came to support rebels fighting to overthrow Mr. al-Assad’s government, was not immediately clear. The website for the transitional government also said that in 2011, the year the civil war began, Mr. al-Bashir held a management job at the state-owned Syrian Gas Company, part of the petroleum ministry. On Wednesday, the company’s website still featured a photograph showing Mr. al-Assad touring a facility.

It is also not clear where Mr. al-Bashir was during the years that followed, or what role he may have played in the conflict, but by 2022, he had emerged as minister of development in the administrative arm of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which for years had held territory in Idlib.

He was appointed prime minister for that territory this year, according to the group’s website, months before the rebel alliance began the assault that overthrew the Assad government.

Mr. Blinken plans to press his hosts for help in ensuring a transition to an “accountable and representative” new Syrian government that respects the rights of minorities, the State Department said. The new government should “prevent Syria from being used as a base of terrorism or posing a threat to its neighbors, and ensure that chemical weapons stockpiles are secured and safely destroyed,” it added.

Mr. Blinken’s most important meetings will most likely take place in Ankara, given Turkey’s close ties to the rebel group that stormed Damascus, the Syrian capital, and toppled Mr. al-Assad. The United States does not directly communicate with that group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which Washington officially considers a terrorist organization.

The State Department said that Mr. Blinken would also continue the U.S. push for a cease-fire in Gaza that would allow for the release of Israeli hostages held there and for the supply of more humanitarian aid to the Palestinian territory.

What is the latest death toll?

As of March, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had documented the names of 507,567 people who had died in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011. The independent Syrian-run organization, which is based in Britain and collates information from multiple sources, said that it had verified another 110,343 deaths of people who were not named, bringing the total of civilians and combatants killed throughout the war to 617,910.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, another independent human rights organization that has been tracking the toll since the start of the conflict, had counted a total of 231,495 civilian deaths through June.

What does the United Nations say?

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights last released an accounting in 2021, when it estimated that at least 580,000 people had been killed to that point, including 350,209 “identified individuals.” The U.N. human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, cautioned at the time that the figure was “not a complete number of conflict-related killings” but that it indicated a “minimum verifiable number, and is certainly an undercount of the actual number.”

Before 2021, the United Nations had not released a report on deaths in Syria since 2014 because it said conditions on the ground made accurate documentation impossible. However, when the war reached its 10th year, the organization responded to the need for updated information with a new report. By then, the war had shifted from large-scale military hostilities to regional clashes between multiple armed groups, making access and accuracy even more complicated, so the U.N. stopped reporting numbers.

How is the death toll calculated?

The U.N. and the Syrian human rights organizations say they rely on on-the-ground interviews, news reports and publicly available information such as death certificates and hospital records. They then identify and exclude duplicates and records with only partial information from the total and check the results against other statistical estimates.

Cases where people had been taken into government custody with no documentation — the forcibly disappeared — are not part of the total, nor are cases in which victims are killed and their bodies not recovered.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights focuses on tallying civilian deaths. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also tracks deaths among the Syrian military, rebel factions, foreign militias and armed units sent by other governments that are party to the conflict, such as Israel, Russia and Iran.

Will we ever know the final toll?

The end of the conflict will bring some clarity. When Damascus fell on Dec. 8, rebel groups opened Syria’s prisons, freeing thousands of surviving detainees to the relief of friends and families. But thousands of other people remain missing.

Fadel Abdul Ghany, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, has counted more than 100,000 men, women and children who were “forcibly disappeared” by the Assad regime since 2011 and who were not included in any death toll. So far, he says, very few have emerged from the prisons, and he has been able to identify only about 3,000 death certificates.

Based on what he has seen from the jails and the documents his team has obtained, Mr. Ghany estimated that at least 85,000 of those forcibly disappeared have been killed in al-Assad’s detention centers.

On Wednesday, the commander of the Kurdish-led fighters said that the cease-fire in Manbij was reached through U.S. mediation “to ensure the safety and security of civilians.” Forces would “be removed from the area as soon as possible,” the commander, Mazloum Abdi, wrote on social media.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, had reported that the Turkish-backed forces captured Manbij on Monday. The Kurdish-led forces denied that.

There was no immediate comment from the U.S., which over the weekend said that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had spoken to his Turkish counterpart and “reaffirmed the importance of close coordination” between the countries to prevent any further escalation, “as well as to avoid any risk to U.S. forces and partners.”

The U.S. has been backing the Kurdish fighters since 2014, a partnership forged amid the threat posed by the Islamic State. Underscoring the importance of the relationship, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, chief of the U.S. military’s Central Command, visited U.S. and Kurdish-led forces in Syria on Tuesday, according to a statement, and also traveled to Iraq.

Though many are thrilled to see the Assad regime end — mixed with some trepidation about what comes next — some are focused more on what it will mean for their relatives in Syria.

Mr. Dalati’s uncle and aunt, who live in the suburbs of Damascus, have been scouring prisons in Syria looking for their 30-year-old son, Eyad Dalati, who has been missing since 2011 and used to drive a truck delivering groceries to stores in the Damascus suburbs.

Mr. Dalati said hopes of finding his cousin, an only child, alive are dimming by the day.

“It’s painful,” he said. “We’re still hoping that our cousin will show up.”

Meanwhile, 10 days after two of Ms. Alia’s brothers joined the Free Syrian Army rebels in their rapid march from the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib to Damascus, the brothers reunited for the first time since 2015 with other siblings and relatives.

The two, aged 48 and 29, were among thousands shuttled to Idlib for refusing to join Mr. al-Assad’s military machine. Ms. Alia on Monday proudly shared videos of the reunion, which featured scenes of celebration including one brother singing as a rifle hung from his shoulder.

For the last 10 days, the brothers texted and talked by phone with her intermittently on their march to Syria’s capital. They were just as shocked at the whirlwind speed at which the Assad regime folded as their Syrian-American kin, she said.

“Even my brother on the ground, he’s fighting and he’s telling me, ‘It’s like a dream,what’s going on right now,” Ms. Alia said. She said he described being astonished by “how easy things are going, how the army is running away, how they’re leaving their weapons behind.”

Now, she hopes her birthplace of Syria can change for the better.

“I love this country,” she said of the United States, “and I want Syria to be kind of similar. I want all people to love each other — Muslim, Shiite, Christian, Jew, I don’t care what they are.”

She said that she wants a new president, unlike Mr. Assad, to “be able to rule for a small period of time and know that he’s nothing but a worker, not God, and he’s there to serve the people, not the people to serve him.”

In short, Ms. Alia wants Syria to be a true democracy, where everyone can express their views without fear of reprisal.

“This is a true revolution that has occurred,” Ms. Alia said, adding everyone is going to learn a lot more about the atrocities committed by the Assad regime as people held in prisons are freed.

“All the truth is coming out,” she said.