Assad Defaced: Syrians Destroy a Dictator's Icons

New York Times

15-04-2025

Visuals by David Guttenfelder
Text by Raja Abdulrahim When Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December, the iconography of posters, billboards and statues emblematic of his family's brutal decades-long grip on the country also came down.
The images of Assad family members — on government buildings and taxi windows, in shops and at ancient sites — were a way to cement the Assad cult of personality and assert control. The dictatorship survived for so long partly by making Syrians fearful and distrusting of one another. 'They practically made themselves gods,' said Ibrahim Qashash, 42, who is from Aleppo.When rebels stormed Aleppo days into the offensive that ousted Mr. al-Assad, Mr. Qashash said he followed them into the city.At a lawyers' union headquarters, he found three posters of Mr. al-Assad. Someone had already made long scratches across them. Mr. Qashash finished the job. As the rebels swept across Syria, symbols that had once seemed omnipresent collapsed.In Aleppo, a statue of one of Mr. al-Assad's brothers, Bassel al-Assad, on a horse was toppled. The horse remained. In a village north of Damascus, the capital, a giant statue of the ousted leader's father, former President Hafez al-Assad, was felled.
The statues were carried away, possibly for scrap metal.
The removal of the images offered catharsis for millions, echoing the fall of other dictatorships, such as that of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq.
More than three months on, visual remnants of the regime linger, partly torn, burned or painted over. They are stop-gap measures until a more thorough clearing can occur.
Some have even been repurposed as a kind of floor mat, allowing Syrians to step on the face of a president who had once seemed invulnerable. Outside the Umayyad Mosque in the Old City of Damascus on a recent morning, Aamir al-Haj Omar, 39, a member of a civil defense group, scanned the walls.The group, known as the White Helmets, is working to remove all of the remaining images of the Assad family.'There is a psychological effect of these images,' Mr. al-Haj Omar said. 'The images of the regime still strike fear in the hearts of Syrians.' The remnants of statues have become backdrops for photos, visual markers of how so much has changed.
In Aleppo, children climb atop the horse that once carried Bassel al-Assad. Some scramble onto a concrete base that once held a bust of his father. In a Damascus suburb, smiling families pose in front of the damaged head of a statue that once instilled terror. At a criminal security building in Damascus, a poster of Bashar al-Assad high up on the wall has been torched, erasing much of his face. But the words at the bottom are still legible: 'criminal security forces.'
Workers will need a large ladder or crane to get it down. The painstaking process of removing all of the images could still take months. But to Mr. al-Haj Omar, it is worth it.
'The security grip that people were living under was because of these symbols of the regime,' he said. 'We want them to forget this feeling and experience optimism.'