December 2024 marked a rupture in Syrian history. It brought an end to a fifty‑three‑year regime built on dictatorship, systematic detention, and crimes against humanity, closing a chapter that had begun in March 2011 as a popular uprising and soon descended into a multi-layered and complex armed conflict, regional proxy confrontation, and internationalized conflict. What started as protests for dignity and basic rights morphed into a fragmented battlefield of armed factions and foreign interests, and ultimately culminated throughout the years in the military campaign ‘’ Operation Deterrence of Aggression’’ that toppled the Assad regime, led on the ground by Hay’at Tahrir al‑Sham (HTS) and its allies.
The year that followed the fall of the regime was not simply “post‑conflict,” but profoundly transitional. It was saturated with events that revealed both the possibilities and the fragilities of this new phase: the formation of the transitional government, the violent coastal clashes in March 2025, the terrorist bombing of Mar Elias church in Damascus, the issuance of the Constitutional Declaration, the Syrian Revolution Victory Conference (December 2024) and the Sweida clashes in the south. Each of these moments left its mark not only on people’s lives, the country’s already‑damaged infrastructure, and the emerging political order, but also on the media ecosystem that tried to describe, justify, contest, or silence what was happening. In other words, the struggle over territory and institutions was mirrored by a struggle over narrative.
This report places that media ecosystem at the heart of the analysis. It treats the first year after Assad’s fall as a dense, unfinished laboratory in which new and old actors compete to define what “Syria” is and who speaks in its name. Rather than assuming that a change of regime automatically produces a free and plural media, we start from the opposite hypothesis: that media structures, legal frameworks, and professional cultures often carry over deep continuities, even when flags, faces, and slogans change. The central question animating our work is therefore not only what was reported during this transitional year, but who owned the narrative, under which rules, and to whose benefit.
To answer this, the report is organized into three main analytical movements. The first maps the media ecosystem and its actors: state‑linked institutions that survived or were repurposed, emerging independent outlets, faction‑aligned platforms, and foreign‑funded initiatives. It examines their ownership, affiliations, geographic distribution, and linguistic diversity, asking to what extent the post‑Assad landscape is genuinely more plural than what preceded it, and where new forms of control or exclusion appear.
The second movement delves into the legal and regulatory framework that began to crystallize in this period: licensing requirements for print, radio, television, and online platforms; accreditation procedures; and the decrees and internal decisions that govern who is allowed to operate, under what conditions, and with what risks. By reading these texts against their practice, the report explores whether the new rules open space for independent journalism or reproduce old regime mechanisms under a different political umbrella, especially through regulatory gatekeeping, vague “hate speech” or “incitement” clauses, and the centralization of permits and approvals.
The third movement turns to narrative ownership around a set of key political and security events: the fall of the regime itself, the coastal clashes and the formation of the transitional government, and the Sweida events. Here, the focus shifts from “who exists” to “who speaks first and loudest,” tracing how different actors framed these crises, which voices were amplified or erased, and how responsibility and blame were distributed. By clustering these narratives thematically around unity and segregation, protection and threat, victimhood and triumph, the report shows how transitional authorities, armed groups, and other power centers used media to consolidate legitimacy, externalize blame, and structure what could be said.
Throughout, the report combines quantitative and qualitative approaches: systematic tracking of aggressions against journalists and media workers; close reading of legal texts and official communications; and narrative analysis of media coverage across events and outlets. The aim is not to provide a comprehensive history of Syria’s transition, but to offer a grounded, critical account of how the media field itself has become a central arena of power in this fragile post‑Assad moment
