Syria's new leader is saying that he will dissolve the many rebel factions there and absorb them into the new ministry of defense. That new leader is Ahmed al-Sharaa. And if he can achieve unity, he'll do something that Syria's former dictator, Bashar al-Assad, never could.

NPR's Leila Fadel, Jane Arraf, and Ruth Sherlock share their reporting from Syria more than a week after the fall of the Assad regime.

Edition host Leila Fadel reports from Damascus, in the first week in a half-century that the Assad family did not rule the country.

People in Syria are looking for their relatives and friends in prisons, hospitals and morgues. The U.N. estimates over a 100,00 people have gone missing in Syria under the Assad regime.

The road to Damascus tells the story of a new Syria emerging from 54 years of authoritarian rule by one family, the Assads. Today's Syria is no longer theirs.

INSKEEP: NPR's Hadeel Al-Shalchi is part of NPR's team in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria. In fact, our colleague, Leila Fadel, is in Damascus. We're hearing with - hearing from her elsewhere in ...

Hey, Leila. LEILA FADEL, BYLINE ... DETROW: Have you met and talked to anyone from HTS during your time in Syria? FADEL: Yeah, I mean, I've talked to a lot of the rebel fighters.

Mouaz Moustafa is in Damascus on a mission, looking for Americans who disappeared in Syria under the Assad regime. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken). L FADEL: On the night we ...

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, on his trip to Syria to help preserve evidence from mass graves.

In some ways, Syria is a land of ghosts, and the job of speaking for the dead falls to their loved ones and the new Syrian government. Leila Molana-Allen reports from the suburbs of Damascus. A warning, images in this story are disturbing. Syrians are ...

In Syria, people are returning home after years of a civil war that displaced millions and left the country divided and destroyed. Assad regime checkpoints that severed any chance of seeing loved ones are now gone like the government.

People in Syria are looking for their relatives and friends in prisons, hospitals and morgues. The U.N. estimates over 100,00 people have gone missing in Syria under the Assad regime.