When the regime of Bashar al-Assad started to topple in November 2024, news travelled fast throughout the Syrian diaspora. Activists and analysts organised eleventh-hour meetings. Some wanted to watch developments on social media. Others wanted to talk about all that had been lost in the almost fourteen years of civil war that had raged since 2011.

Even for seasoned observers like Rime Allaf – the daughter of a Syrian diplomat and herself a campaigner for Syrian freedom – the fall of Assad came as a shock. By that point Allaf had been writing It Started in Damascus for some time; her book is the bitter story of fifty years of tyranny in Syria under the Assads, taking readers back to the violent and repressive 1980s, Rifaat al-Assad’s failed attempt to seize power from his brother Hafez and the death of Hafez’s eldest son, Bassel.

In December last year Allaf and her friends watched, incredulous, as Aleppo – the site of a campaign of near-­annihilation in 2016 – fell to the Syrian rebels, who then took Hama, Homs and, finally, Damascus itself, supposedly the regime’s last outpost, its stronghold.

None of this was meant to happen.