After Assad: Syria’s sectarian reckoning

Published June 20, 2026 5:30am ET



On the anniversary of Bashar Assad’s fall, a small group of professionals gathered at Aznavour, a restaurant in Damascus’s Old City. Red light washed over stone walls as hookah smoke hung in the air and a television cycled through Arabic music videos. They had come to talk about what had changed in Syria — and what had rushed in to fill the space left by a regime that collapsed a year earlier.

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