Inside Assad’s ransacked palace: Anxiety pills, graffiti and shredded posters

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. DAMASCUS, Syria—Rebel fighters and civilians strolled through the grounds of Bashar al-Assad’s presidential palace on Tuesday, stepping on shredded posters of the former dictator who had fled to Russia days earlier. In Assad’s abandoned office, his desk and floor were littered with books and papers: a history of the Russian military, a map of northeastern Syria, a biography of himself.

Strips of antianxiety pills were in their packaging on the desktop. On one of the yellowed windows overlooking Damascus, someone had spray-painted, “God damn your soul, Hafez," a reference to Bashar’s late father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for some three decades before his son inherited power. The palace was a window into the last days of a dictator who for more than a decade used torture, bombings and chemical weapons in a long war to suppress a rebellion against him, which began during the Arab Spring protests in 2011.

In recent days, demonstrators have swarmed into Umayyad Square in the center of the capital, posing with rebel fighters holding assault rifles and waving the green, white and black flag of the Syrian revolution. After a yearslong civil war, the regime crumbled in less than two weeks as its allies, Russia and Iran, weren’t able to help it stop a rebel advance. Rebels aligned with the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, also known as HTS, seized a series of Syrian cities, paving the way for an almost frictionless takeover of the capital on Sunday.